udon

Does it?

Yes, in the sense that “thing moves around and does stuff” becomes more predictable if you assume a certain degree of consciousness. This is easier than “thing is at this position now, was at a different position before, was at yet another position before that”. You reduce some of the complexity and unpredictability by introducing an explanation for these changes of world state. In my world, so far I worked well with the assumption that other humans and animals have some consciousness and at least I’m not aware of any striking evidence that would raise doubt on that.

The problem with this isn’t that it’s literally unprovable

Yes, that’s a problem, but it’s relatively similar to the other one. It’s actually quite hard to “prove” anything with real world connection. However, in the case of other humans/animal consciousness, evidence suggests so (at least for me). The evidence in the case of “AI” is different, though. For example, they seem to have no awareness of time and no awareness of the world beyond the limited context of a conversation. Besides a fancy marketing term that suggests there is something similar to living beings involved, what we currently see are admittedly impressive programs that run on statistics, but I don’t need to assume any “consciousness” to explain what they do.

Welcome to radical constructivism :) The question whether other people or cats can experience emotions is in fact a problem people have been thinking about quite a lot. Answers are not very satisfactory, but one way to think about it (e.g., some constructivists would do that) is that assuming they do have a conscience simplifies your world model. In the case of “AI” though, we have good alternative explanations for their behavior and don’t need to assume they can experience anything.

The other important bit is that not assuming some phenomenon exists (e.g., “AI” can experience emotions) unless proven otherwise is the basis of modern (positivistic) science.

EFF does some good stuff elsewhere, but I don’t buy this. You can’t just break this problem down to small steps and then show for each step how this is fine when considered in isolation, while ignoring the overall effects. Simple example from a different area to make the case (came up with this in 2 minutes so it’s not perfect, but you can craft this out better):

Step 1: Writing an exploit is not a problem, because it’s necessary that e.g., security researchers can do that.

Step 2: Sending a database request is not a problem, because if we forbid it the whole internet will break

Step 3: Receiving freely available data from a database is not a problem, because otherwise the internet will break

Conclusion: We can’t say that hacking into someone else’s database is a problem.

What is especially telling about the “AI” “art” case: The major companies in the field are massively restrictive about copyright elsewhere, as long as it’s the product of their own valuable time (or stuff they bought). But if it’s someone else’s work, apparently it’s not so important to consider their take on copyright, because it’s freely available online so “it’s their own fault to upload it lol”.

Another issue is the chilling effect: I for one have become more cautious sharing some of my work on the internet, specifically because I don’t want it to be fed into "AI"s. I want to share it with other humans, but not with exploitative corporations. Do you know a way for me to achieve this goal (sharing with humans but not “AI”) in today’s internet? I don’t see a solution currently. So the EFF’s take on this prevents people (me) from freely sharing their stuff with everyone, which would otherwise be something they would encourage and I would like to do.

Meh, better approach it to assume it doesn’t understand emotion unless proven otherwise. Does a fork understand what human emotion is? A pillow? You wouldn’t assume that either I guess.

It’s also about control where you’re being rained on. The shower gives you targeted rain, so you can wash yourself with one hand while eating a (dry) pizza with the other.

Thank you for your service.

1. it’s easy to make fun of
2. it makes every other programming language look better in comparison

What is legit science?

Quite a naive (and also stereotypically American) perspective, really. Just ignoring major parts of the economy, like the music, film, book publishing industries etc. They are all based on people doing anything that’s not “legit” according to this guy. Also a smell of a very naive concept of “legit science” lurks behind this. Clearly someone who has no clue about how science works.

おまえはもう死んでいる。