alt Hacker NewsAnyone who believes AI running on silicon could in principle be conscious has to believe that biological computers are conscious, right? Why aren't those people voicing more concerns?
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How much commentary do you read on biocomputers? There are a lot less people talking about biocomputers than there are talking about AI in general. Remarks on the matter across the board are almost exclusively concerns and skeevishness, proportionally it's not even close.
So then, is it a question of volume? Ask yourself, within the last 2 years, have you thought about LLMs or biocomputers more? Probably the former, right? LLMs are ubiquitous within day-to-day life and massively marketed to the public and biocomputers are esoteric lab experiments that most people come across in a once-in-a-blue-moon news article. We talk and think about things that we are adjacent to, those form our preoccupations. Why aren't people who speak up about the Israel/Palestine dynamic speaking up more about West Papua? Or the mid-19th century geopolitical relationship between Cambodia and Viet Nam? Epistemological asymmetry.
If ai running on silicon can be conscious - does it imply that the same calculation done by a human with pen and paper is also conscious?
I think they _could_ but I doubt our current activation functions are sufficiently nuanced to allow consciousness that we would recognize.
same question, I thought a long while before clicking publish contemplating if I were sounding too larp-philosophical but it had been bothering me far too long
Fine, I tweeted something about it.
> Why aren't those people voicing more concerns?
They like money
Not really. Are jelly fishes conscious? Are carrots conscious? Those are biological and serve complex functions.
Okay fine, I'll voice my concern: I'm concerned.
Anyone who believes that humans are conscious has to believe that mosquitoes are conscious too, right?
This does not follow. Just because biological brains can be conscious does not mean that all of them are, the same way that not every computer is running windows XP.
Why would you expect more concern from people about biological computing? It's not even demonstrated feasibility yet, while LLM based "AI" is already widely used.