I could definitely see people just taking it for granted that it's fine due to the difficulty of pinning down one particular source of consciousness versus another. It isn't obvious and everyone who goes through the transporter claims to feel fine, so unless they're thinking a lot about their own consciousness why question it? Endless killing by convenience and ignorance.
Well, no. Subjectively either the observer is continuous or it isn't. Either you walk in one end and walk out the other continuing to perceive your body and the world around you, or you're replaced by a different perceiving entity with the same memories.
Certainly the speed at which your body is deconstructed might have an effect on the pain and horror of it all, but in terms of your consciousness remaining afterward it kind of either does or doesn't. If some other consciousness is looking through your eyes because you own has been extinguished, it's not going to do you much good if it just happened fast enough that it doesn't have to grapple with the memory of disintegration.
This just makes me think of the transporter issue.
As far as I can work it out, either transporters are death machines and Star Trek is a secret dystopia, or consciousness has a universal root so it doesn't actually matter. Like, either the observer changes and just has the same configuration of thoughts and memories, or the observer is the same regardless and the only difference between individuals is their thoughts and memories.
It doesn't seem like the people in Star Trek know this with any certainty, though, one way or the other.
Art. Do something creative for its own sake. Play some music, draw something, write something, glue something silly to your wall. Remember that not everything you do has to come with purpose or justification.
You're alive, and at this very moment aren't being physically consumed by a predator. Take it in and let yourself enjoy it.
There's definitely a ceo-driven tendency to insert AI anywhere and everywhere whether or not it actually is a reasonable application. What I'm saying is that there are also some reasonable applications. When people focus entirely on "AI useless!", they're fooling themselves every bit as much as the people who think it's suitable for every possible application. Their arguments are just as empty and vibes-based.
That's not what "thinking model" means. It's not a statement about cognition, it means it takes steps in which it explains itself to itself to check if it's missing something.
Well, it has initial utility with a bad trade-off and the utility dereases as addiction sets in. There's a point at which smoking a cigarette is reducing stress, but eventually it increases the baseline stress before having a cigarette to the point that it's a net loss. Eventually it's not smoking reducing stress from other sources, it's pushing back against the mountain of stress of addiction.
If it didn't initially reduce stress in the first phase, you wouldn't do it enough to get to addiction.
Personally, one of the things I found most useful for quitting was the idea that smoking another cigarette would never fix the desire to smoke, only not smoking could do that.
They can use it to do a lot of things. AI is far from perfect and makes all sorts of weird mistakes, but so do people. Arguably there's substantially more value in training inexperienced humans to get better in their fields than in settling for AI as a cheap alternative that starts with a maybe slightly higher or similar but cheaper baseline, but that doesn't eliminate all value they create. You can make arguments about the long term benefits socially or for individual organizations that leverage AI, but spend a couple hours playing with Claude and it becomes extremely evident that they're not anything resembling useless.
Even if we completely throw chat bots out the window, there are some instances of general utility for thinking models. This comic is making a moral argument that's more compelling, but arguing that they're actually totally useless doesn't really reflect reality
That does seem like a reasonable use for an LLM, but it's very important to realize that an LLM is not a database. You don't necessarily get out what you put in. LLMs can lose context, they can hallucinate, and they can make all sorts of weird decisions that might compromise the quality of your data. There's no workaround for actually checking on that information when the stakes are high.
An automated system that isn't an LLM would be more reliable.
What episode?