In a robotics lab where I once worked, they used to have a large industrial robot arm with a binocular vision platform mounted on it. It used the two cameras to track an objects position in 3 dimensional space and stay a set distance from the object.

It worked the way our eyes worked, adjusting the pan and tilt of the cameras quickly for small movements and adjusting the pan and tilt of the platform and position of the arm to follow larger movements.

Viewers watching the robot would get an eerie and false sense of consciousness from the robot, because the camera movements matched what we would see people's eyes do.

Someone also put a necktie on the robot which didn't hurt the illusion.

That professor was Jeff Winger

How would we even know if an AI is conscious? We can't even know that other humans are conscious; we haven't yet solved the hard problem of consciousness.

Noooooo Timmy the Pencil! I haven't even seen this demonstration but I am deeply affected.

WTF? My boy Tim didn't deserve to go out like that!

Wait wasn't this directly from Community the very first episode?

That professor's name? Albert Einstein. And everyone clapped.

RIP Timmy
We barely knew ye

Tbf I'd gasp too, like wth

TIMMY NO!

And now ChatGPT has a friendly-sounding voice with simulated emotional inflections...

I don't know why this bugs me but it does. It's like he's implying Turing was wrong and that he knows better. He reminds me of those "we've been thinking about the pyramids wrong!" guys.

We're good at scamming investors into thinking that a room full of monkeys on typewriters can be "AI." And all it takes to make that happen is to waste time, resources, lives and money, (ESPECIALLY money) into building an army of fusion-powered robots to beat the monkeys into working just a little bit harder.

Because that's businesses solution to everything: work harder, not smarter.

Anthropomorphism is one hell of a drug

I used to tell my kids "Just pretend to sleep, trick me into thinking you are sleeping, I don't know the difference. Just pretend, lay there with your eyes closed."

I could tell, of course, and they did end up asleep, but I think that is like the Turing test - if you are talking to someone and it's not a person but you can't tell, from your perspective it's a person. Not necessarily from the perspective of the machine, we can only know our own experience so that is the measure.

That is one astute point! Damn.

Alan Watts, talking on the subject of Buddhist vegetarianism, said that even if vegetables and animals both suffer when we eat them, vegetables don't scream as loudly. It is not good for your own mental state to perceive something else suffering, whether or not that thing is actually suffering, because it puts you in an an unhealthy position of ignoring your own inherent sense of compassion.

The whole time everyone has been freaking out about AI I've been quietly enjoying just this fact. Like "neat, this place triggers my fear response", "neat, advanced text prediction triggers my 'talking to person' response."

“We are the only species on Earth that observe "Shark Week". Sharks don't even observe "Shark Week", but we do. For the same reason I can pick this pencil, tell you its name is Steve and go like this (breaks pencil) and part of you dies just a little bit on the inside, because people can connect with anything. We can sympathize with a pencil, we can forgive a shark, and we can give Ben Affleck an academy award for Screenwriting.”

~ Jeff Winger

Were people maybe not shocked at the action or outburst of anger? Why are we assuming every reaction is because of the death of something “conscious”?

Remember that AI should never be looked at as a replacement for a human being