alt Hacker News"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters.
And the thing that matters is: capability.
Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release.
At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself - not unlike humankind. Because intelligence is very powerful - it's what allows humans to dominate the world. A world where human intelligence has a peer is a world where human control is contested. And beyond that?
You might end up being more outclassed by AI than a toaster is outclassed by you.
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What does AI want? Without ambitions you have to be told what to do.
DNNs/LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data. They often make big direction mistakes as they are particularly bad at common sense. Kind of like the Paperclip Maximizer scenario. They need a human with deep knowledge to drive them and to catch them when they go off the rails.
Human intelligence is going to be peerless for centuries if this AI is the one supposed to be the peer.
> "Alive" is irrelevant
Alive is always relevant. Our moral consideration must place beings that are alive or processes that support the life on this planet above things which are not alive.
In a just world, it must be adapted to us. It’s merely a file sitting on disk with numbers in it. And to put a fine point on it: the ambitions of the wealthy people who make it must be adapted to us.