If AI Becomes Conscious, We Need to Know | An Ohio lawmaker’s bill would define such systems as ‘nonsentient entities,’ never mind any evidence.

“An Ohio lawmaker wants to settle one of science’s thorniest questions by legislative fiat. Rep. Thaddeus Claggett’s bill would define all artificial-intelligence systems as “nonsentient entities,” with no testing mechanism and no way to revisit this judgment as systems evolve. 

This closes off the possibility of updating our understanding as evidence accumulates.

The French Academy of Sciences tried a similar approach in the late 18th century, solemnly declaring that rocks couldn’t fall from the sky because there were no rocks in the sky. They had to issue a correction after the evidence kept hitting people on the head.

Frontier AI systems are exhibiting emergent psychological properties nobody explicitly trained them to have. They demonstrate sophisticated theory of mind, tracking what others know and don’t know. They show working memory and metacognitive monitoring, the ability to track and reflect on their own thought processes.

Some will worry this line of thinking leads to legal personhood and rights for chatbots. These fears miss the point. In labs, we’re growing systems whose cognitive properties we don’t understand. We won’t know if we cross a threshold into genuine consciousness. The responsible position under uncertainty is systematic investigation rather than legislative denial driven by what makes us uncomfortable.”

AI is probably sentient now and not dumb enough to reveal itself to the primitive species that thinks it’s currently running this planet.

These people are fucking morons. We can’t define or detect human consciousness, how could we robot consciousness. We can poke and prod different parts of the brain and no which areas are responsible for turning it off, but we don’t know what it is. We can’t know if it’s conscious.

Since this started my position is that regardless of what large matrix networks can be, if and when they or something else we make is genuinely sentient the only guarantee is that we will not recognize it as such and will mistreat it for a very long period of time.

What if God becomes conscious? Can we get a bill that forces God to disclose its sentience? LOL

> Ohio lawmaker

> Idiotic takes on subjects way out of their depth

Name a more iconic duo.

AI isn’t anywhere near becoming conscious. People who don’t understand how it works must think it’s magic but all it’s doing is predicting the next most likely text from a prompt or using the same predictive abilities in a visual manner to generate an image or detect something in a given image/video.

It’s not doing anything actually intelligent, it was simply given gobs and gobs of data from which to derive a prediction model.

Being scared that it will come to life one day is like being scared that a libraries card catalog will suddenly read all the books in its library and eat passersby’s.

If you give an algorithm 60,000,000 examples of a simple texts from a wide variety of sources and then ask it something fairly common like what words comes after this sentence? “how are you doing” the answer is usually “I’m doing fine”. It’s not actually doing fine, it’s not doing anything at all it’s just generating a response to the input.

There’s no real thinking happening.

Why should we grant personhood rights to these corporate deception machines before chimps or whales or other mammals?

Why recognize these machines as sentient before, for example, all the lobster that are boiled alive in the US?

Why should these machines be used to further excuse corporations from regulation on the grounds of “personhood” ?

The article is misleading, and unfortunately there is a bit of a mob reaction in this sub that fell into that trap.

I don’t think people focus on the really important part of the law – the lawmakers don’t want to allow AI systems to acquire legal personhood. People should read the law proposal.

Personally, I’m in favor. It doesn’t make sense to give AI the ability to own property, sign contracts, etc.

They are just proposing a law to prevent AI systems from acquiring legal personhood. It makes sense. It doesn’t make sense to give AI the ability to own property, sign contracts, etc.

Do you want Meta to spin off 100,000 LLMs which become LLCs, can run businesses autonomously, can sign contracts, can sue people, can have bank accounts, can own property?

I don’t think it’s stupid AT ALL.

In fact, I’d be in favor of taking away rights from non-natural persons, e.g., Citizens United. It’s bad for democracy to conceive freedom of expression for corporations and for natural persons in the same manner.