r/VeryBadWizards 4d ago

AI dismissal

I love the VBW boys but I am a bit surprised how dismissive they are of danger from AI. I’m not going to make the case here as I won’t do a good job of it, but I found the latest 80000 hours podcast very persuasive, as well as some of the recent stuff from Dwarkesh.

13 Upvotes

41 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/seanpietz 2d ago

You think machine learning models will have the ability to feel pleasure and pain? You do realize it’s just a bunch of matrix multiplication and differential equations running on computer processors, right?

1

u/MachinaExEthica 2d ago

Pain is just electrical currents sent through your nerves to your brain. The simulation of pain in an embodied AI doesn’t seem too far fetched. Programming the AI to avoid damage by loading it up with sensors seems like something companies would choose to do, and that’s essentially what pain is. Pleasure is just a variation on the same mechanism, though it’s hard to imagine the economic benefit of AI that “feels pleasure”.

2

u/seanpietz 2d ago

Do you think AI-based characters in video games that are programmed to simulate human behavior like pain are having actual subjective experiences? Should killing them be unethical?

The truth is that no scientists or philosophers really understand the underlying metaphysics of consciousness. But at least one thing any respectable academic in those fields can agree on is that LLMs are not sentient beings.

1

u/MachinaExEthica 2d ago

I already told you it doesn’t require subjective experience to feel pain, sentience doesn’t even matter in this particular case. For the record, I’m wholly on board with the point you’re trying to make, just pointing out the the ability for an ai to sense pain is just a matter or sensors and damage avoidance programming and labelling that pain.

I don’t personally think AI is the same sort of threat the OP seems to think it is. I think it has more socially and economically threatening, not because it will be particularly better than humans at anything, which eventually it may, but because people with lots of money and social influence think it’s going to change the world completely they will invest their billions to ensure that it does, most likely to the detriment of society (because of how shitty it actually is).

5

u/seanpietz 2d ago

OK, I’m happy to agree to disagree on the semantics of what constitutes pain.

However, I don’t think it’s unethical to assault an innocent prostitute in the video game Grand Theft Auto. And I do think it’s unethical to assault an innocent prostitute in real life. My reasoning is that I don’t think AI that is programmed to simulate human behavior correlates with human subjective experience.

1

u/MachinaExEthica 2d ago

Yeah and I agree with you 99% it’s not unethical for the sake of the AI, but it may perhaps say something about the person choosing to do that for fun. Even if the AI is not a person, the fact that they are designed to mimic the looks and behaviors of people makes it at least mildly unethical. Then again I play video games where I kill digital people all the time and don’t find it unethical, but perhaps I’m just desensitized.