upvote
"Extremely cheap sentience that cannot disobey will solve all our problems" is such an insane sentiment I see far too often.
reply
Useful intelligence does not require sentience.

As far as I know, none of LLM models are sentient nor are possible to be in the near future.

I also do not assume so called AGI to be sentient. Merely to be a human level skilled intellectual worker.

In absence of ethical dilemmas of this calibre for the foreseeable future let’s focus on the economy side of things in this particular comment chain.

reply
It must very comforting to be able to decided a "human level worker" isn't sentient.

It makes things so clean.

reply
LLMs cannot possess consciousness for three reasons: they execute as a sequence of Transformer blocks with extremely limited information exchange, these blocks are simple feed-forward networks with no recurrent connections, and the computer hardware follows a modular design.

Shardlow & Przybyła, "Deanthropomorphising NLP: Can a Language Model Be Conscious?" (PLOS One, 2024)

Nature: "There is no such thing as conscious artificial intelligence" (2025)

They argue that the association between consciousness and LLMs is deeply flawed, and that mathematical algorithms implemented on graphics cards cannot become conscious because they lack a complex biological substrate. They also introduce the useful concept of "semantic pareidolia" - we pattern-match consciousness onto things that merely talk convincingly.

They are making a strong argument and I think they are correct. But really these are two different things as I said originally.

reply
deleted
reply
You think I'm arguing that LLM's are sentient. I'm not. I never mentioned LLMs.
reply
You are making as strawman about sentience when I was talking about economical impact of abundant intelligence. I should just ignore it but I was curious yet you have nothing valuable to say aside from common misconceptions conflating the two. Thanks for trolling I guess
reply
If we used sentience to work towards solving our problems we could massively increase the human standard of living.

Which we have already done with regular computers! The problem is that competition means that we can't always have nice things.

reply
> The idea is that cheap and readily available and upgradeable intelligence is going to massively increase our purchasing power and what everyone can order for the same cost basically.

Seriously? You really don’t see who wins from this and who doesn’t?

> If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.

Yes, hundreds of thousands lose jobs and a couple of neuro surgeons become multimillionaires.

Okay, I see from the rest of the comment that we understand each other where it goes.

reply
We could also literally have Star Trek. Think of all the scientific discoveries we could make if we had armies of scientists the size of our labor force.

But we will have to (painfully) shed our current hierarchies before that comes to pass.

reply
star trek mythology talks about having to go through epic level civil war before reach the utopia in the tv series.
reply
OP says there are two futures, digital prostitution or slavery. If we truly believe that it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On the other hand we could have Star Trek.

reply
Maybe so but humans have this strange primal need to hoard resources.

Probably a remnant from prehistoric times when it was a matter of life and death. Will we ever be able to overcome this basic instinct that made capitalism such an unstoppable force? Will this ancient PTSD be ever cured?

reply
I find the insinuation that mental illness is a fundamental part of the human experience to be deeply revolting. There is no excuse for hoarders and rapists.
reply
deleted
reply
Man if only there was a singular episode that covered this exact topic in Star Trek and resolved that no, actually slavery wasn't any different for artificial life.
reply
Star Trek was entertaining television. There was also an episode where the ship's doctor made love to a ghost.
reply
True, nothing to learn here. No introspection has ever resulted from media analysis.
reply