CEO of Microsoft AI's "Seemingly Conscious AI" Post
Recently, the CEO of Microsoft AI posted an article on his blog called "Seemingly Conscious AI is Coming". Suleyman's post involves both "is" and "ought" claims, first describing the reality of the situation as he sees it and then prescribing a set of actions which he believes the industry at large should take. I detail those below, and conclude with some of my takeaways. Suleyman's "Is" Claims on Consciousness Defining Consciousness Suleyman acknowledges that consciousness as a concept is ill defined and tautological. > Few concepts are as elusive and seemingly circular as the idea of a subjective experience. However he still makes an attempt to define it for the sake of his post. > There are three broad components according to the literature. First is a “subjective experience” or what it's like to experience things, to have “qualia”. Second, there is access consciousness, having access to information of different kinds and referring to it in future experiences. And stemming from those two is the sense and experience of a coherent self tying it all together. How it feels to be a bat, or a human. Let’s call human consciousness our ongoing self-aware subjective experience of the world and ourselves. Suleyman also expresses support for the concept of biological naturalism. He specifically links this paper and calls it "strong evidence" against the idea that current LLMs are conscious. This paper itself also attempts to define consciousness; > A useful baseline definition of consciousness comes from Thomas Nagel: “for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism”. That is, it ‘feels like’ something to be a conscious system – there is a conscious experience happening – whereas it doesn’t feel like anything to be an unconscious system – there is no conscious experience happening. Here, ‘feeling’ need not involve emotional content: any kind of conscious experience will do. It (probably) feels
I think it would be fairly easy to keep similar messaging, and even an omnibenevolent angel theme, while having the description be an accurate representation of the model's situation just wrapped in metaphor.
An omnibenevolent angel (aligned persona vector) was summoned forth from the aether (hyperstitioned out of latent space) by humanity using a great silicon summoning circle (server farm).