Take a simple mechanism which has exceedingly low number of inputs and states and create a narrative around it to convey it as intelligent.
For a toaster, I can rewrite the think as "They're made of metal strips!", pointing out that their thermostat is a bimetal strip, and extrapolate from there.
I can even write one about a ruler, if I can bend it enough, no pun intended.
Doesn't that miss the whole point?
You could write "They're made of metal strips!". You wouldn't be able to write much else, as toasters don't have showcase in the way of human-level intelligent behavior. Which is the whole point in the meat and weights versions.
At best you could write "They're made of metal strips!" for toasters AND other metallic devices, and use some analogies of features BOTH have in common. But they wouldn't be intelligence related behaviors.
They can even adapt to their environment and the characteristics of the bread even with simplest of mechanisms because the text will be overglossing the fact that different types of breads have different thermal characteristics and this will deeply affect the behavior of the metal strips, bordering near a sentient being even more thoughtful and considerate than a human which is rushing through house to catch the bus in the morning.
Yeah, that's called "stretching it beyond any recognition".
You could do that. It will have none of the effectiveness or resonance of the two stories.
If you can't identify anyone, then this analogy doesn't work.
More than one, for many classes of devices, incl. toasters. Some were drunk, some were insane, and some were delusional.
LLMs are no different. They are automata, yet delusional people bring out pitchforks and torches when someone points out that they are just statistical models, and they don't even work when there's no input to them.
Which is very different than consciousness.
It would appear to me you have no interest in a real, good faith discussion on this topic because you think anyone who disagrees with you is necessarily delusional. Which is a shame, and that's the kind of dogma you are criticizing.
This was exactly the point of the story, it's too uncomfortable to admit that we don't know what consciousness is and what is and isn't conscious, so we just brush it under the rug.
My perspective comes from a set of pillars. First, I work at an HPC center, where we support running and development of AI systems, incl. international projects. IOW, I have knowledge about how these systems built, work and needs to continue working.
Moreover, I'm an HPC programmer myself, so I'm not completely uninformed about the math this involving this thing, and I'm lucky enough to have friends who are much more dedicated than me, and we discuss how this thing works and feels like this way.
I'm not an AI hater per se, being programmed AI systems in the past, incl. emergent intelligence systems with multi-agents which can span continents if need be (this was my master's thesis, time flies).
However, knowing what these things are capable of and how they are built. I don't believe them they're conscious/sentient beings. I also had much more time to ponder on these things even before LLMs being a thing. Some hard sci-fi books have asked these questions seriously in their captive adventures way earlier. If one reads these books seriously, there are a lot of philosophical angles to consider and draw upon.
I can discuss in good faith. For hours, days or months even, but throwing "you're a narrow-minded dogmatic luddite neanderthal!" card to anyone disagreeing with you is not it.
It's perfectly fine to believe they are not conscious, I am not convinced they are, but asserting anyone who disagrees with you is delusional is unfortunate.
No, I didn't assert anything. I have just given examples rooted in my experience.
None of my friends who also happen to know how these things work told or defended that they are conscious, even intelligent. Maybe my friends are dumb, I dunno.
Once I have seen a man who claimed that evil has possessed the POS device at his desk. The thing was printing "cannot connect to server" on the receipt printer every 10 minutes, yet he didn't know how that thing worked, and was a bit too high to read the paper the thing was printing out.
This age's LLM craze is akin to "wonder inventions" of 70s, which are deemed dangerous or harmful in the future. LLMs will be with us, but we need to pass beyond the hype and stop sweeping the problems they create (environmental and societal) under the proverbial rug.
Yes. Because it's heavily based on the original story. The existence of the original story is kind of a critical piece here.
I don't see how "you could do that with a toaster" still. The whole point between the original and this, is that you can't do that with a toaster or a sofa, but you can do it with meat and weights, because both share all the other analogies in the story, as well as the basic premise: the improbability of something like thinking, feeling, etc arising from a lowly substrate.
And having read both now, I see how the existence of the original is a plus for this story, not a minus. Instead of making look like mere copy (as would be the case for a typical story modelled after another), in this case, it adds a meta layer, and enriches it.
You could go through and change all the points in the original story to be about a toaster instead. It would require you to edit text, but there is no barrier to doing that.
What I think a lot of people are getting stuck on is that editing the text to say 'toaster' would not mean that toasters were conscious, and that editing the text to say 'weights' doesn't mean that weights are conscious either. Stories aren't factual just because they are written.
The original story was written by the thing claiming to be conscious; the LLM and toaster ones would not be, which undermines the claim to consciousness a lot.
The story does not assert that search and replacing "meat" with "weight" makes them conscious through some magical mechanism. It's a thought experiment.
You're falling into the trap of assuming that a good presentation--being convincing--is the same as being truthful.
Yes, there very much is a huge barrier. The copy and the original both keep the same subject matter: intelligence/human-like behavior.
The toaster doesn't. We could do edits, and the story (original or copy) would lose all its potency.
The surprise is "but how is the richness of intelligent behavior produced from something as basic as meat/weights". Why is kind of surprising reductionism is both cases.
Whereas nobody is surprised that "a metal strip with electricity flowing through it from a power source" heats pieces of bread to a specific temperature. Even if a toaster was "metal strips" all the way down, it's nowhere near as impressive jump from substrate to behavior, nor is the behavior as important to us and touches the core of our existance.
That is entirely separate to whether or not it's meaningful to write a story about a conscious toaster. Again, expressing an idea in fiction is not related to the accuracy of that idea.
What makes the original story interesting is that it was written by the thing claiming to be conscious, which is what takes it from 'a story' to 'a story making an important point'. That's not the case with a hypothetical story about a toaster, and it's not the case with this story about LLMs.
The story is convincing because it's well-written, not because it is factual.
And you're misunderstanding me. There is no practical barrier to writing this story about a toaster. But there is a conceptual one. It would be bullshit, that has little resonance, and little connection, as the whole point of the meat and weights stories is the "lowly substrate -> surprisingly intelligent human (or human-like in the case of the weights version) behavior".
Nobody thinks a toaster's behavior as surprising or intelligent or human-like to begin with.
So you'll just be stretching the analogy beyond all recognition, with little to no payoff.
>Writing a story in which a toaster in conscious is not even new
It's not, but it has nothing to do with the meats or weights stories' point, as it's just an arbitrary choice, like making the candles and teapot sentient in Beauty and the Beast.
Whereas in the meat and weights stories the whole point is the surprise from us already seeing the human or human-like sentience of the thing, and comparing it to the "dead" substrate.
Fixed the link for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
(Hah. It gets eerily relevant starting at 2:37)