Ruminations on Advanced AI

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14 responses to “Ruminations on Advanced AI”

1. 

   Malcolm Pollack

   May 21, 2025

   Hi Bill,
   It’s just a matter of (probably not much) time before the question of “robot rights” comes up as a genuine legal issue. (If there’s any possible traction in it, we can be sure that it will become what is sometimes called a “lawyers’ ramp”.)
   Such a case will immediately bring to the fore the immensely difficult question of consciousness, because it is in virtue of the capacity for subjective experience, in particular the capacity to suffer, that we place other beings in the circle of moral inclusion that confers intrinsic rights. An unconscious machine, no matter how intelligent or sophisticated its behavior, and no matter how convincingly it spoofs its “personhood”, has no claim to such inclusion.
   So the question will have to be whether one of our fancy AI-driven machines is actually conscious. But how are we going to answer that? Will your premise P1 stand up in court? (Even if it doesn’t, that won’t be enough to settle the case; we’ll still need to clarify what is sufficient for consciousness, and whether our gadgets qualify.)
   As an aside, I’ll say this here also: given what these gizmos can already do, isn’t it time for “functionalists” to put up or shut up?

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2. 

   Grant Castillou

   May 21, 2025

   It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
   What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
   I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
   My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow

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3. 

   Elliott

   May 22, 2025

   Thanks, Bill. This is an interesting post. I’m with you on (C): Bio-humans are really conscious, etc., but bots are not.
   I wrote an article during the summer of ’24 in which I addressed some of the topics you discuss. The article was published in Epoché Philosophy Monthly in October of ’24. (See link below).
   In short, I argue that AI-bots are not conscious and not persons, but if it is possible for us to create AI-bots that are persons, we should not do so merely for the sake of having them serve us.
   https://epochemagazine.org/76/is-it-morally-permissible-to-create-ai-androids-merely-to-serve-us/
   (Epoché tries to avoid the “simplifications of pop-philosophy” and the overly narrow “special-interest” approach of some philosophy journals while publishing articles of some depth and interest both to philosophers and non-philosophers.)

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4. 

   Elliott

   May 22, 2025

   Hello, Malcolm. You are right about the “difficult question of consciousness.”
   Regarding functionalism, I wonder if that theory might win the day in a court of law, given that it is accessible to empirical observation. In other words, if consciousness “is what it does” (to put functionalism perhaps too succinctly), since we can empirically observe what AI-bots do, and since empirical observation enjoys a high standing in courts of law, legal rights might be granted to AI-bots on a functionalist justification.
   What do you think?

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5. 

   BV

   May 22, 2025

   Sex bias in hiring decisions made using LLMs.
   https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/the-strange-behavior-of-llms-in-hiring?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

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6. 

   BV

   May 22, 2025

   Elliot @ 12:16: >>In short, I argue that AI-bots are not conscious and not persons, but if it is possible for us to create AI-bots that are persons, we should not do so merely for the sake of having them serve us.<< I agree. Your article is excellent. Clearly written, it makes no obvious mistakes. It enriched my understanding of the topic, mainly by your use of abductive reasoning to support the conclusion that AI-driven androids, no matter how indiscernible by behavioral and other external criteria criteria from bio-humans are not persons.

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7. 

   Bill V

   May 22, 2025

   Elliot @ 12:16: >>And yet, for all we know, perhaps synth-persons are possible. One reason to support this claim is that conceivability is defeasible evidence for possibility, and it seems we can conceive of synth-persons. The idea of a synth-person does not seem obviously contradictory. After all, we draft stories about them, such as Humans and Blade Runner. However, conceivability is not demonstrative proof. Our conceptions can go wrong. Perhaps synth-persons are strictly impossible and inconceivable. When we tell stories about them, we don’t conceive of synth-persons qua persons but imagine something sufficiently similar to enable good storytelling. As Descartes noted long ago, there is a difference between imagining and conceiving.<< I have long held that conceivability does not entail real possibility, and that x could be impossible despite its conceivability. You grant this, I think, but then make a point that hadn't occurred to me, namely, that synth-persons might be really impossible AND inconceivable. Is that right? I of course grant the Cartesian distinction between imagining and conceiving. I can conceive of a chiliagon, but I can't imagine one. Your point escapes me. Our conceptions can go wrong only on the assumption that there really exists something that I am trying to conceptualize. But we cannot assume that there really are synth-persons. The topic of synth-persons raises the question of emergence -- tricky as hell -- and that of a metabasis eis allo genos, a jump, saltation from one genus to another, as would seem to be necessary if a genuine person could be built from subpersonal/nonpersonal parts.
   Another such metabasis would be the leap from quantity to quality. Ramp up the quantitative complexity of a system and then . . . qualia emerge. I have the sense that talk of emergence is just talk: a word is used to paper over a difficulty or name a problem rather than solve it.

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8. 

   Malcolm Pollack

   May 23, 2025

   Hi Elliott,
   I’ve just read your article, and will second Bill’s remarks about it: very helpful, clarifying, and thought-provoking.
   In the “Legal Ramifications” section, you suggest that “perhaps we should either not create such androids unless we can obtain practical assurance that they are not persons, or if we create them under epistemic conditions of uncertainty, we should grant them legal personhood, which would give them legal rights and responsibilities, protecting them from exploitation and holding them legally responsible for wrongdoing.” I think not creating them is a non-starter — I don’t believe we are going to be able to put this toothpaste back in the tube — and so your argument that under epistemic uncertainty we should err on the side of assuming their personhood becomes morally forceful (despite the strong abductive argument you make earlier, which should incline us to doubt that they are anything more than fancy machines).
   This immediately raises the practical question of just what the downsides are for wrongly ascribing moral and legal rights to things that aren’t persons at all; especially to agents that can act unpredictably and forcefully (and increasingly so, as AI improves).
   “Conceptual disruption” — a term I hadn’t heard before — perfectly describes what’s going to happen when this question, and the many others your essay raises, need suddenly to be addressed and resolved by government, the legal system, and society as a whole. And it is all going to be upon us far sooner than most of us realize.

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9. 

   Elliott

   May 23, 2025

   Bill, thank you. I’m glad you found the article helpful. It raises some questions, though doesn’t settle any. But the abductive case does seem to support the conclusion that AI-androids are not persons but only zombie-machines that function as if persons.
   What strikes me as a difficult practical problem is what to do regarding the legal status of AI-androids. It seems there are reasons to give them legal rights and reasons not to do so. I hope our judges have the requisite philosophical background to handle the topic. The problem is just around the corner. I watched a video a few months ago in which Musk predicts there will be more androids than cars in the near future. The tech industry talks of buying and selling these androids, yet I haven’t heard any concerns from the techies about the possibility that what they want to buy and sell might be persons. That lack of moral awareness worries me.
   Your two metabasis problems are very difficult. How could a genuine person jump out from an aggregate of parts each of which is subpersonal/nonpersonal? How to get something personal from nothing personal?
   And how can quality leap out from mere quantity? I agree with you that talk of emergence seems to name the problem rather than solve it. Talk of emergence dons the robes of a solution but might instead bury the question underneath.

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10. 

    Elliott

    May 23, 2025

    Malcolm, thanks for reading the article. I’m glad it was helpful. I agree with you that we probably can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Moreover, whatever toothpaste hasn’t been squeezed out yet will be squeezed as quickly as possible. I’m concerned that the squeezers will be techies who — though competent in matters of Techne, are short on Sophia, driven by the monetary bottom line or by geopolitical pressure or by reputation in the tech industry — but who lack a grasp of relevant philosophical matters, and who might dismiss them as impractical even if grasped. And what about the politicians who also want to squeeze the tube? Do they understand what they are doing?
    You raise an important question about the downsides of wrongly ascribing moral and legal rights to things that aren’t persons. Two problems come to mind. First, the favoring of the droid over the human. Suppose we grant legal rights to AI-droids which aren’t persons at all. These rights get absorbed into our institutions and into the thinking habits of the insufficiently careful thinkers who run those institutions, which then act on ‘droid rights’ in ways that are disadvantageous to human beings who actually possess moral rights. Suppose a situation in which a court of law settles a case in favor of an android and against a human person in a way that violates the human’s rights and favors the ‘rights’ of the droid, or a situation in which a benighted university admin creates a ‘droid rights department’ at a university, staffs the department with dozens of high paying jobs where people do things like create a ‘droid celebration month,’ organize ‘droid pride’ marches, and run mandatory ‘droid respect workshops,’ thus taking resources away from human students and the human instructors who teach them. All the while, the droids aren’t actually persons.
    Second, the idea that we wrongly ascribe rights to things that aren’t persons suggests to me a kind of absurdity that we’d be forced to live with. This is the kind of practical absurdity that Nagel discusses in The Absurd. He writes: “In ordinary life a situation is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality.” If the droids are not persons, and we have reason to hold that they aren’t, we’d be living according to the pretension (or aspiration) that droids are persons, and though the pretension doesn’t align with reality, we’d be stuck with it, because once an idea gets ingrained into our institutions, even if it’s a false idea, it can be very difficult to remove.
    (See top of second page of Nagle’s paper here: https://people.tamu.edu/~sdaniel/NagelAbsurdityofLife.pdf )

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11. 

    Malcolm Pollack

    May 24, 2025

    Elliott,

    “…and though the pretension doesn’t align with reality, we’d be stuck with it, because once an idea gets ingrained into our institutions, even if it’s a false idea, it can be very difficult to remove.”

    Wait — could something like that actually happen?
    Just kidding, of course. I’ve actually come to see what you’ve just described as not only possible, but probably inevitable, as I’ve yet to come up with any idea of how it might possibly be prevented.

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12. 

    Joe Odegaard

    May 24, 2025

    Marjorie Taylor Greene takes on the (in my opinion demented or worse) Grok AI chabot:
    https://www.breitbart.com/faith/2025/05/24/the-judgement-seat-belongs-god-not-you-mtg-fires-back-when-left-leaning-chatbot-grok-questions-her-faith/
    I think that the real danger of IA resides in the fools who believe it.
    More later
    Catacomb Joe

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13. 

    Tom T.

    May 25, 2025

    I think the problem boils down to the question of whether human conscious experience is or can be reduced to the human rational capacity. For me, the former is much wider in scope than the latter. AI is purely rational, algorithmic logic, no matter how much it can express the courtesies of human interactions, and it can never be more than that. To posit AI as conscious and worthy of legal rights is to reduce consciousness to the cognitive, concept formulation capacity of human beings.
    There are many philosophies that restrict or limit human reasoning to its proper role and leave open the wider context of conscious experience, the Romantics, Kant, Kierkegaard, and many others. To the extent you go with these sorts of efforts (as I do), then so too is the question settled as to whether AI computational, algorithmic skills at cognitive reasoning make it conscious. It is not and never can be. Thinking, even thinking well and clearly, is not the sum total of the human.

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14. 

    Joe Odegaard

    May 25, 2025

    In order for all of us to throw off illusions, it is essential to remind ourselves that ALL a digital computer is really doing, is adding and subtracting ones and zeros in the physical world. That is the sum total of it.
    Layered upon the incessant noise of the ones and zeros, in a way that is too smart by half, are words and images.
    And then at the level of these words and images, the AI programs suck up, in a vast, uncritical, universal plagiarism, the sum total of human folly, as if wisdom could come from that.
    As an architect and inventor, I want to tell you that ideas come from outside of time and space, and they come in silence, and in a flash. They do not come from something I have made, and they do not come from adding and subtracting ones and zeros.
    The hubris of thinking that a computer, and a program, which you have yourself made, can be smart or conscious, is exactly the same idolatry as worshipping the golden calf in the desert. Hidden in this conceit is the attempt to worship the human self as equal to God: “I have made life, thus I am equal to the Creator of all life; if I worship my creation, the worship comes around full circle and lands on me.” This is exactly the pride that got Lucibello kicked out of heaven.
    I want to scream like an old testament prophet against this modern, yet ancient evil.

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