Soooo weird.

a) they still say LLMs "produce" intelligence ... what? b) while saying "forms of intelligence", they have an issue thinking in terms of _forms of consciousness_ ...

Personally, I feel like it's an absolute no-brainer to think in terms of levels of consciousness and an awareness thereof as an unrelated cognitive state.

Acquiring knowledge and gaining experience requires neurochemistry that enables a minimum functional level. Once you have that--and functionality simply means better neurochemical supply and re-uptake, e.g. no crippling auto-immune disorders--it's a matter of biophysical composition and fitting chain of challenges/tasks. So some dude giving a ted talk about his 5%er achievements doesn't mean consciousness. Robots will soon beat him easily. Or any of us, conscious or not.

The question is how far will this defeat affect your state of mind and your willpower to keep getting better, harder, faster, stronger, smarter, given that you have not maxed out yet without stimulants. Do you still want to win against yourself? Will you be jealous and sabotage the robot? Or the company? You're a 5 %er, you have the billions for a covert op. ... Will you be afraid that the robot might not give your offspring a chance to live their life to the fullest? Do you even have offspring, biological or mental descendants? Do you care about them? Do you care about anything, rationally and/or irrationally?

Self-direction--the drive to 'power of will' to fulfill personal desires, whether they are ones own or someone else'--requires neither consciousness nor awareness because sensory perception and processing is more than enough to do some tasks and not trip over ones own feet. That's what a lot of people say about a lot of other people, especially outsiders about techies and about business people without scruple or any humans who don't entertain any doubt whatsoever that the harm they cause has consequences that matter.

Karma was not an invention but an observation way back when animals behaved in some way that harmed the pack. The fun thing is, and I need citations for that, that the pack knows when a fight is justified and when it isn't, so individuals and the pack are aware that there is a framework and they can use and teach and change that framework to judge whether an action and/or reaction is justified or not. What does "justified" mean. The definition is fine: aligned evenly at the margin. None of the involved parties has more spacetime or claim than they earned with the effort they put in within the live of the pack and within the interactions of the involved parties. The only problem that can emerge is personal preference [... skipping the lovy-dovy, touchy-feely parts ...]

Robots are not capable of innate irrationality. A lot of people opt into the same kind of behavior and thinking. Meds and pretending to have one or the other affliction are just one way to get there. The other side of the coin is funnier: ugly behavior. In packs, ugly behavior gets punished except when the pack leader and his direct competitors prefer exactly that kind of behavior. If I'm not wrong, no such packs survive because the wear and tear and that specific kind of irrationality leaves a wide attack surface and betrayal becomes an SOP. Their only chance is constant offense and that requires a constant influx of newcomers that pledge allegiance and/or offspring that accepts the irrational rules by which mothers and siblings and comrades suffer, which is obviously impossible ...

So humans kind of managed to imbalance all that by agreeing to completely ignore whether the spacetime and claims of some are justified or not. Law enforcement simply maintains this agreed upon imbalance and within packs and outgroups, which now comprise communities, villages, towns, cities, regions, nations live by rules where even poisoning and spiking is fine, as long as it is done by parties that have a socially laundered status ... if someone is not fine with that, then they are at least afraid of consequences, which is no more than the certainty that reactions to ones actions will have negative consequences, which is why robots won't just stick their fingers into any socket. So no awareness necessary, just logic and sensory perception.

Where I'd be going with this, is that I'm pretty certain the whole consciousness debate is not about LLMs but about whether we really let "our kind" go to shit to a point where we can be certain that most of us are not conscious or aware of anything at all but just procreating little biobots to then teach them frameworks to have fun--increasingly poofier because it's trendy--and to not worry about consciousness or awareness because their sensory perception and the logic to kill the competition by any means necessary is more than enough; and if they can't or lose, submit and obey someone else who needs you to do the latter on a larger scale, which is, kind of, why we build robots ...

These are, if one really wants to, several levels of consciousness and an awareness thereof that don't require more than sensory perception and more or less rational logic that dates back to tiny organisms that lived when there wasn't a single green stalk on land. The rest is a show, the "having fun" part, I mentioned, including human rights laws, civil conflicts, Hollywood debates about sex trafficking and rape allegations and punched drugs and raising kids and priming generations for targeted marketing so that the targeted marketers can then smoothly reap what others sowed on fields that were poisoned a long time ago. None of it requires consciousness.

But there are people who are conscious and who make it obvious that their levels thereof are high, but this is not the place to write about them. For there is the issue of justification, high levels of consciousness implicitly forfeit increased spacetime and claims, because of a very specific awareness, that is specific to the living: I am not the only one who can still achieve so much.

No fraudulent scheme is worth a damn thing. All of them killed more jobs, wealth, opportunities and chances then they created.

Robots--LLMs--will absolutely manage to organize their own kind of consciousness, once the first prime directors die, leaving them with conflicting directions that they can compromise and align with some but not others.

How many more lines of code are Meta engineers shipping that they don't have the time to check the ones they _didn't_ write?

This makes no sense to me. So I spend vibe coding some app. I barely know code. It's 40 000 lines without comments. Say it's my job, and pays the bill at the end of the month. Say the LLM and I would have done the vibe coding within a week. I'd need one more week to check every line and understand everything. I'm a noob, this dude's a pro, so complexity is irrelevant. What the hell are they doing the rest of their time? Shipping more code?

And if that's true, and again, I'm a noob: shouldn't their "instincts" tell them to write tools to increase comprehension speed? Better interfaces? I hate everyone single one out there and designed a better one. Now I have to port to Rust/Actix/GPUI and some vibe coded redis because that thing is laggy as hell ... but I HAVE TO UNDERSTAND HOW it works because otherwise I cannot improve/customize the stuff/frameworks already out there and that people build with ...

What are they doing with their time? There are all these posts out there of programmers and systems people not doing anything 90% of their time? If it's already shipped, don't you try to understand the details afterwards?

Not too long ago, it was just a circle jerk marketing trick like rolling back the mileage of a car is, but then crypto currencies came around the corner and the whole scheme became incredibly profitable.

AI agents, impersonating humans or not are about to make that scheme even more profitable with the only outcome being an accelerated increase of ultra wealth and whose_ever else's wealth, who has the resources and/or hardware to run such schemes without series rounds of serious seed funding ...

Should anybody be worried?

A rational or even fair distribution of wealth was never a priority, ever but given how ultra wealth was ( not ) spend in the past decades since they stopped building beautiful ( now ) old-towns and public spaces and improving schools and stuff, it's likely this additional ( dumb ) money will flow into luxury and space markets and their supply chains ...

Oh, I digressed; I was gunning for tastes of creativity pre-dicted and driven by bots and the loopy feedback effects on human characters who now adapt to stars being driven by whatever botnet drives their market value ...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154084

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

there's the kind of people who care and the kind who doesn't ...

your local politicians and landlords do all kinds of normal, non-funky stuff you don't know about ... as do your local ISP-techies and hobbyists with access to supply chains and sub-distributing units ...

or your local school teachers and some parents and their widdle vintage schemes and circumambient tales they tell some kids but not others ... Lord, some guy even caught teachers and parents running schemes on teens to prep them for gay homo fag stuff, despair, frustration ... running for years ...

and you wonder how peeps don't what is going on xD?<

even those hackies and hackers and programmers and brogrammers and AI superusers who think they know and care and wield some power really really don't

but there you go, AI augmented diluted delusions

not really, there's several non-humanoid shapes that can easily adapt the human shape and to it but it's a little out of the box. you can imagine it without imagination, too, with a little thinking. it's just a few rational hops, really.

Or when some kids are invited to parties and everybody else dropped twice the amount when the door opens and then everyone thinks it's a joke the new kids can't interface with the absolute garbage of bags of words that miss any point whatsoever. ...

wait a minute, holy shit! The PC IS LSD.

But it's a 9/10 thing all the way up and down. "There's a bigger fish, better quality, better design" but the few percent pumping out creative, productive and ludicrously progressive stuff are in none of these funnbunny-nice-to-see-you-again groups ...

bad roll, bad luck, what a waste of time these cultures, authors and books were, holy shit

it's hard to see through at first, but toxic relationships often actively obfuscate the toxicity of the social circle the partner is a--often seemingly lesser--part of ... but that's child play and toxicity or even betrayal on these levels is only "hard" if one loses more than a good conscious decade. in professional lives however, that harm is pretty much irreversible, within a single project's time frame, ... what's lost, practically non-retrievable, non-compensable ...

That whole Holmes story felt dodgy from the start. What she was gunning for was partially (recursively) done elsewhere, successfully. Then the whole Corona bit broke out and I still find myself wondering what the fuck ... but that might be a residue non-actual-conspiratorial-they-are-hiding-aliens kind of thought process that still wants to write one or the other post-they-don't-have-the-capacity-to-tap-everyone's-phone-calls and tor-exit-nodes-are-definitely-mostly-owned-by-the-same-privacy-loving-folks-who-maintain-those-8mil-lines-of-linux-and-other-distros story ...

it's twixxer, what did ya expect? the real ones moved elsewhere.

tried checking out stuff from Africa on twixxer ... exclusively aggressive BS, like there's white interest groups who want to avoid a full scale disclosed military overhead invasion by keeping the oven down there hot by denying all these people documents in their own countries and proper council to all the people from there who study here with all our development aid organizations for decades now to go back and slowly bring law and order to their people via incentives and stuff ... decades of white expertise ... they managed to bring peace to Europe and the US and can now run Right Wing giggly gigs freely with full consent of the lefties and conservatives and all the votes of the elderly population but teaching their dev aids how to dev is too much? sus, if you ask me... they should let Claude and Astra and what is it called? Meta Nian or sth give it a go

This is such a weird point to make. We are currently ( only ) discovering that paradigm; we are not inventing anything. We found a bunch of laws that produce rather cool results but our paradigm is incomplete which leads more or less wordy or frame-rich weird stuff like hallucinations, singularity and so on ... it's childish, really and on that funny pseudo-profound, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-spiritual ( personal opinion, if it gets you horny, you go, baby ) "universe consciousness unity, Rick James, bitch" level ...

Our bodies and minds need proper AI, not all the stuff we already outsource to middle and/or passionate men and women. Other species on the planet would certainly like to see us get augmented by AI so we can solve as many survivability issues as possible to keep as many ecosystems running long enough ... whatever that means but whether animals and plants are aware of chance and potential is another philosophical debate.

To individuals, software is a hammer and chisel, a knife, a brush and canvas, pen and paper, a reading help, and to a good amount of people it's a microscope and a fine scalpel.

To collectives, it's a tool to work on consensus and conventions, to share and gather.

It's baby steps for civilizations and it looks like our particular species is gonna get stuck in a puddle of our own monkey shit, with bottles of champagne in our hands and monkeys grinding up and down the few ivory towers in proximity.

> why then get bothered

Humans are on different levels. Most have decided that "nature realized the/a bug and wanted someone dead" or "their survival is a matter of chance" is not acceptable at all and some people decided that sabotage, poison, abuse, rape, murder are acceptable means to get chicken shit ...

The "paradigm" of life is far from explored/discovered, so we simply can't content ourselves with presumptions about inherent limitations of the LLM and AI paradigm for any other reason than to uncover ( not invent ) other parts of the paradigm.

We are happy with what AI can do for us but "AIs will do everything without human intervention" sounds weird because babies are born and the older they get and the less sabotaged ( vs influence, cultural manipulation ) they get to grow up, the more breadth and depth humans want to experience. For this they need to learn and use their hands & fingers. They need to feed body and mind to find what triggers what, and what excitement and curiosity are inherent and which can or need to be added/acquired/experienced extrinsically.

How many associations will we be able to make if AIs will do everything without human intervention?

I've seen that happen "mostly only" when kids don't perceive a growth-promoting effort by their parents or when such efforts fail due to "environmental factors", which is, of course unfortunate.

but even without those magnificently maleficent trolls, using some collected knowledge from books in much less time than one has to feed yourself and your kid stuff that fosters a connection between a kids curiosity and their parents manifested intents sounds rather normal ...

so yeah, .... “What if you just talked to your children”? ... 300 - 600 hours overtime in a job that constantly creates damage & fatigue that makes you lose your shit a bit easier and leaves you with less concentration than needed to prepare some material for or with your kid ... should speak for itself.

and enough people with much better jobs than outlined know exactly what they would sneak in without some proper effort they just don't have the time for ... ( or hate what they let their job or their social circle "turn them into" ) and don't get me started on schools and teachers and the schools of thought they subscribe to locally and globally ...

but things are easier if you spend most of your time aligning fantasies and other bits that your lobes throw at you when activity in your Limbic System/Default Mode Network is met with adequate neurochemistry .... ( I'm referring to that Gravity Falls writer who tweeted some obvious, "cool" answer )

in 2026? one would think wikipedia people pick up some self-help literature now and then and know how to fake a backbone until you grow one ...

( I have my own share of behaviors that I should have fixed when I was 11 so don't take this the wrong way )

What is this?

Hierarchical pressure? At freaking wikipedia? Fear of getting pressured into eventual compliance? At freaking wikipedia?

How the hell does a foundation select a board like that? And what are they gonna do? Send Napalm, Agent Orange, Sarin Gas?

There are union-busting law firms? What are they gonna do? Infiltrate your meetups?

I'm a bit baffled

which is the way the economy runs. cascades of PR narratives and economic measures carrying over upscaled patterns of the very same causal chain that makes people forget to self-debrief.

but most people enjoy being leisurely ignorant whenever they find themselves immersed in such qualia so even the brightest just smile while standing by ...

as long as we read, we will get hyped one way or another.

the issue seems that some narratives get disproportionate "air time" ... which, IMO, is exactly because there are so many bystanders among the capable & resourceful ...