psi's recent activity
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Comment on A skeptical overview of AI and consciousness in ~humanities
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Comment on A skeptical overview of AI and consciousness in ~humanities
psi (edited )Link ParentMy understanding of the author's use of "skeptical" is not that we should be skeptical that AI is conscious, but rather we should be skeptical of anyone who claims to know whether AI is/can become...My understanding of the author's use of "skeptical" is not that we should be skeptical that AI is conscious, but rather we should be skeptical of anyone who claims to know whether AI is/can become conscious or not. That is, we should be skeptical of arguments both for and against AI consciousness. If you haven't yet, you should really read the first couple chapters in which the author elaborates on how "consciousness" and "artificial intelligence" are load-bearing terms that are basically impossible to nail down. (As if to prove the point, some philosophers argue that rocks are conscious.) When it comes to consciousness, there are no obvious answers, just as there is no obvious divide between "artificial intelligence" and "real intelligence", so to speak.
Suppose we take the argument at face value. There is no LLM declaring this, so the argument is entirely moot.
Well, as I said, the author is not so much concerned about current generation LLMs as he is future iterations. Nevertheless, it's worth examining some of the points you made. You are declaring that consciousness must contain some "essential" properties (see chapters 3 and 4), specifically that it must have "access" and "specious presence" (see text or my footnote [1]). However, neither of these properties are necessarily essential. For instance, it could be that we have conscious experiences that are not available for further processing (experiences that don't backpropagate, so to speak), but because we wouldn't process these experiences, we wouldn't remember them, either.
Moreover, generalizing any essential property risks suffering from a certain type of "sampling bias", as the author calls it -- we risk making a classification error in which we equivocate between "consciousness" (whatever that is) to the human experience of having consciousness. For example, it could be that some creatures experience the world in a way outside time (like Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians or Ted Chiang's Heptapods), which would render "specious presence" unnecessary.
In general, I would really just recommend you read Schwitzgebel's book. He's certainly thought more about this subject than either of us.
[1] Taken from chapter 3:
(4) Access. To be conscious, an experience must be available for “downstream” cognitive processes like inference and planning, verbal report, and memory. No conscious experience can simply occur in a cognitive dead end, with no possible further cognitive consequences.
(9) Specious presence. All conscious experiences are felt to be temporally extended, smeared across a small interval of time (a fraction of a second to a few seconds) – generally called the “specious present” – rather than being strictly instantaneous or wholly atemporal.
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Comment on A skeptical overview of AI and consciousness in ~humanities
psi (edited )Link ParentI think your question amounts to asking whether AI models can "feel" or merely mimic feeling , which is addressed in Chapter 7 ("The Mimicry Argument Against AI Consciousness"). First, it's worth...I think your question amounts to asking whether AI models can "feel" or merely mimic feeling , which is addressed in Chapter 7 ("The Mimicry Argument Against AI Consciousness"). First, it's worth establishing what the author means by mimicry; these excerpts are probably sufficient for you to get the drift.
When you know that something has been designed or has evolved as a mimic, you cannot infer from the readily observed feature to the further feature in the way you ordinarily would in the model. At least you can’t do so without further evidence. Once you know that the viceroy [butterfly] mimics the monarch, you cannot infer from its wing pattern to its toxicity. Maybe the viceroy is toxic, but that would need to be separately established. Similarly, knowing that [a toy doll's] “hello” mimics a human greeting, you cannot infer that the toy actually intends to greet you.
[...]
A consciousness mimic is an entity that mimics some superficial or readily observable features that, in some set of model entities, reliably indicate consciousness. But because the mimic has been designed or selected specifically to display those superficial features, we the receivers cannot justifiably infer underlying consciousness – not in the same way we can when we see those same features in the model entity. This is obvious for the “hello” toy, less obvious but still true for entities specifically designed to pass the Turing test or otherwise mimic the surface features of human language. An important class of AI systems are consciousness mimics in this sense.
Searle and Bender aim for a stronger conclusion, inviting us positively to conclude that the mimics do not have conscious linguistic understanding. I don’t think we can know this from their arguments. But both thought experiments successfully describe consciousness mimics whose outputs we should reasonably mistrust. The case for consciousness is undercut. It does not follow that the case against consciousness is established.
[...]
Ordinarily, if you’re having what seems to be a meaningful conversation, you can infer that your conversation partner is conscious and understands the meaning of your words. But if you know that the entity is designed to mimic human text outputs, you ought no longer be so sure.
The author mentions later in the chapter that "the large majority of experts on consciousness agree that classic pure transformers are not conscious", so if a current generation LLM were to declare, "Now I am just as conscious, just as full of experience and feeling, as any human", we are probably correct to dismiss the statement as mimicry. However, post-training complicates this assessment: tomorrow's frontier models will not be evaluated exclusively on their ability to produce plausible-sounding text. Indeed, "feeling" will likely be an explicit (or at least auxiliary) training goal (emphasis added):
Recent Large Language Models such as ChatGPT and Claude build upon the mimicry structures of pure transformer models but also receive post-training. Reinforcement learning from human feedback “rewards” human-approved outputs, strengthening the associated weights. Models can also be reinforced for being “right” by external standards, and some can access tools like calculators. To the extent the machines move beyond pure mimicry, the Mimicry Argument applies less straightforwardly. For now, mimicry-based skepticism still seems warranted, since their core architecture remains close to that of pure transformers, and their humanlike outputs are still best explained by their pretraining on word co-occurrence in human texts.
In the longer term, we might imagine architectures more thoroughly trained on the rights and wrongs of the world itself – maybe like AlphaGo but with the larger world, or some significant portion of it, as its playground. Outputs would be shaped primarily by success in real-world complex tasks, perhaps including communicative tasks, rather than by resemblance to humans. The Mimicry Argument would then no longer apply. Skepticism about their consciousness, if warranted, would need a different basis.
In general, this book is quite comprehensive and comprehensible. There is also an entire chapter on whether biological substrate matters (chapter 10), which will likely address your question from another angle.
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Comment on European Parliament achieves upgrade to air passenger rights in ~transport
psi Link ParentYeah, given Ryanair's history of dark patterns, this is what I suspect as well. Ryanair's basically subsidizing the cost of tickets for some customers by banking on other customers making honest...Honestly the "higher margin" sounds like them charging people 60€ for not having the app installed.
Yeah, given Ryanair's history of dark patterns, this is what I suspect as well. Ryanair's basically subsidizing the cost of tickets for some customers by banking on other customers making honest mistakes, which is a pretty shitty way to treat the people you're supposed to be serving.
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Comment on Arch User Repository compromised, 1500+ packages affected in ~tech
psi Link ParentOn the other hand, the compromised PKGBUILDs do two things: add npm as a dependency and use it to install atomic-lockfile in a post-install script. So unless someone is the type of user who...On the other hand, the compromised PKGBUILDs do two things: add
npmas a dependency and use it to installatomic-lockfilein a post-install script. So unless someone is the type of user who actually scrutinizes every line of code from a git repo (or is rightfully distrustful of npm dependencies), that person would not notice the malware injection.It's like blaming Tesla drivers for crashes when the autopilot randomly fails and the driver didn't respond in the 3 second window between autopilot's disengagement and the accident. The larger issue is that the AUR is fundamentally insecure but works well in >99% of cases, luring users into a false sense of security; it's a design problem.
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Comment on US FBI says Google engineer used internal search data to win $1.2M on Polymarket in ~tech
psi Link ParentWell, yes, but that's sort of like saying the point of drug dealing is to sell drugs. Barring the proper legal frameworks, such activities are not lawful.Well, yes, but that's sort of like saying the point of drug dealing is to sell drugs. Barring the proper legal frameworks, such activities are not lawful.
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Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech
psi Link ParentIn a recent interview, Ezra Klein referred to such constructions as "attachment hacking". (I'm not sure where he got the term from; possibly here.)In a recent interview, Ezra Klein referred to such constructions as "attachment hacking". (I'm not sure where he got the term from; possibly here.)
Klein: I find it interesting. “Attachment hacking” is the idea that one thing happening in A.I. which is different than, as you note, social media algorithms, is that the A.I.s have been designed — they didn’t come up with this on their own — to hack the way we attach to other people.
So when I’m talking to Claude, it’s constantly saying to me: Well, if you want my honest opinion — or: The best piece I read on this is — or: That’s a great point.
There’s no reason it has to pretend to have a first-person pronoun with me.
Claude is not an “I” in that way. Nor is ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok, or any of them, but they speak to you as if they are, and that’s a design choice to attach you to them.
[...]
I can feel it working before I shut that down, or I try to shut that down. Who knows if I’m actually being successful.
But it’s amazing to read these moments in which this algorithm is posing as another entity offering me an emotionally connected response. Giving me praise I might want or offering me candor that I might admire.
And I know it’s [expletive], and yet my brain is tuned to recognize that as connection.
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Comment on US Pentagon puts building blocks in place for Cuba invasion in ~society
psi Link ParentI think you're focusing on the wrong bit. It's worth emphasizing that the Trump admin specifically called Cuba a failed state, not an economically weak one. Objectively this isn't true (a failed...I think you're focusing on the wrong bit. It's worth emphasizing that the Trump admin specifically called Cuba a failed state, not an economically weak one. Objectively this isn't true (a failed state would have no functioning government, e.g. Libya or Haiti), so that should already be sufficient to dismiss the explanation as nonsense.
However, we might be charitable and assume they mean that Cuba is on its way to becoming a failed state. But the rolling blackouts that have recently impacted Cuba were directly caused by the US's embargo, so if the Trump administration were truly concerned about preventing Cuba from becoming a failed state, they could just (partially) lift the embargo. But obviously they won't do that, from which we can conclude that the justification is not merely nonfactual but also pretextual.
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of May 18 in ~society
psi Link ParentOf course, the fact that it specifies Democratic elected officials already suggests the settlement is not politically neutral. And depending on how you parse that sentence, you could distribute...Of course, the fact that it specifies Democratic elected officials already suggests the settlement is not politically neutral. And depending on how you parse that sentence, you could distribute the adjective Democrat[ic] across the whole list of items, i.e. Democrat[ic] elected officials, Democrat[ic political and career federal employees, etc, which would necessarily mean that people would presumptively preclude victims from suing Republican officials and agents. Obviously such an arrangement cannot be legal.
Regarding (4B), another complaint is that, despite Congress having power of the purse, only one of the five seats is assigned to Congress, and (as you said) Trump can unilaterally remove anyone at any time, which makes that one token seat functionally useless.
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of May 18 in ~society
psi Link"Lawsuit Argues Trump’s $1.8 Billion Fund Excludes Those He Targeted." The New York Times. In my not at all expert opinion, this lawsuit is probably better from a standing perspective than the..."Lawsuit Argues Trump’s $1.8 Billion Fund Excludes Those He Targeted." The New York Times.
A coalition of individuals and groups says it was targeted by an overzealous Justice Department under President Trump in a lawsuit filed on Friday, challenging the $1.8 billion fund the president said would be created for victims of a “weaponized” federal government.
[...]
“By its own terms, the anti-weaponization fund is available only to claimants who assert that they were targeted by ‘Democrat’ administrations, even though the current administration has weaponized the awesome power of the federal government against its perceived political opponents like no other administration before it,” the lawsuit said. “Neither the First Amendment nor the equal protection guarantee of our Constitution countenance such blatant partiality.”
In my not at all expert opinion, this lawsuit is probably better from a standing perspective than the lawsuit brought earlier by DC cops. People like James Comey and Kilmar Abrego Garcia have undoubtedly been victimized by so-called "lawfare", yet they have been arbitrarily excluded from the fund (and since the fund expires a few weeks before the end of Trump's term, the next administration wouldn't be able to repurpose it). The entire arrangement is so gross, though, that I suspect some court somewhere will bend over backwards to find that somebody does have standing, and that no, the President cannot create a nearly unlimited fund to shower convicted criminals with financial rewards. (This is assuming that Congress doesn't just outright block the fund, which is starting to seem like a possibility.)
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of May 18 in ~society
psi Link"The Strangest Thing Donald Trump Has Said in Some Time." The Atlantic. And so on and so on. Honestly the lame excuses are almost worse than not attending."The Strangest Thing Donald Trump Has Said in Some Time." The Atlantic.
Donald Trump’s most amusing habit is meting out casual abuse to his sycophants. His recent answer to a question about the wedding of Donald Trump Jr. may, depending on how deserving one deems Trump’s eldest son of mistreatment—poor Don Jr. was, after all, born into the Trump life—qualify as his most hilarious riff ever.
The scene is the Oval Office, today, midday. Trump is asked by a reporter whether he plans to attend Don Jr.’s wedding to the Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson this weekend. Here is the president’s full response:
Uh, he’d like me to go, but it’s gonna be just a small, little, private affair, and I’m gonna try and make it. I’m in the midst—I said, ‘You know, this is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things.’ Uh, that’s one I can't win on. If I do attend, I get killed. If I don’t attend, I get killed by the fake news, of course, I’m talking about. No, but he’s, uh, got a very, uh, person who I’ve known for a long time, and hopefully they’re going to have a great marriage.
Now let us analyze.
[...] He first floats the explanation that it will be “just a small, little, private affair,” as if there may not be space in the party for him, the father of the groom—who, we have already established, wants him to attend.
Trump then pivots to a new excuse: He is waging war with Iran. This conflict, although serious, has not prevented the president from engaging in activities such as marathon social-media-posting sessions, regular golf outings, and an event two weeks ago to promote a future UFC bout at the White House. [...]
And so on and so on. Honestly the lame excuses are almost worse than not attending.
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Comment on Donald Trump’s deal to drop suit against US Internal Revenue Service creates $1.8b ‘anti-weaponization fund’ in ~society
psi (edited )Link ParentThere was a judge overseeing the lawsuit, and like any reasonable judge, she appeared extremely skeptical that the two parties (Trump and Trump's Department of Justice) were actually adversarial...There was a judge overseeing the lawsuit, and like any reasonable judge, she appeared extremely skeptical that the two parties (Trump and Trump's Department of Justice) were actually adversarial parties. Facing potential judicial scrutiny, Trump decided to settle [with himself]. To quote The New York Times:
Mr. Trump’s decision to drop his suit against the I.R.S. appeared to be intended to strip Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who had been overseeing the I.R.S. case in the Southern District of Florida, of her appointed role in approving a formal settlement agreement. By dismissing the case in its entirety, Mr. Trump was able to reach an agreement with his own appointees without risking the rebuke of an impartial and independent arbiter. Judge Williams, tacitly acknowledging her hands were tied, accepted the president’s dismissal of the suit and formally closed the case by the end of the day.
(Left unsaid is the reason for the choice of venue. It seems obvious to me that Trump had been hoping to draw Judge Aileen Cannon, who had previously sabotaged the stolen documents case using a series of dubious legal maneuvers, each more legally dubious than the last. I doubt Trump would have felt compelled to settle if Judge Cannon had been overseeing the lawsuit instead. )
Worse of all, it's not clear who (if anyone) has standing to sue and therefore block the settlement.
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Comment on Smartphone recommendations? in ~tech
psi Link ParentOh whoops, I somehow filtered out everything after "Not an Apple" -- my bad! But yeah, the microSD card requirement does significantly limit the options.Oh whoops, I somehow filtered out everything after "Not an Apple" -- my bad! But yeah, the microSD card requirement does significantly limit the options.
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Comment on Smartphone recommendations? in ~tech
psi LinkTo me the obvious choice would be a Google Pixel of some variant. In my experience, pretty much every Android phone ends up being a compromise in some way, but at least with the Pixel series...To me the obvious choice would be a Google Pixel of some variant. In my experience, pretty much every Android phone ends up being a compromise in some way, but at least with the Pixel series you're guaranteed 7 years of updates and a no-bloat experience. Plus the camera sensors are generally very good.
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Comment on When Richard Dawkins met Claude in ~health.mental
psi Link ParentI don't think the Russel's teapot analogy works here (to wit, something that could in principle exist, has no supporting evidence, but whose existence could be proved by observation). In fact, I...I don't think the Russel's teapot analogy works here (to wit, something that could in principle exist, has no supporting evidence, but whose existence could be proved by observation). In fact, I think in many ways LLMs are the anti-Russell's-teapot: we have plenty of behavioral evidence to suggest they're conscious, but there exists no avenue to prove it, similar to how I can't prove that bats are conscious and you can't prove that I'm not a p-zombie.
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Comment on What's something that you missed out on? in ~talk
psi (edited )Link ParentMy dude(tte)! You're only 26! You have plenty of time to develop your hobbies! Just remember that your hobbies are for you, not anybody else, and that you don't need to "perform" at a professional...My dude(tte)! You're only 26! You have plenty of time to develop your hobbies! Just remember that your hobbies are for you, not anybody else, and that you don't need to "perform" at a professional level to enjoy them. And in truth, the fact that your output fails to meet your expectations is a good sign. It means that you have good taste. Hopefully this advice from Ira Glass will resonate with you:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Speaking from personal experience, I never took piano lessons growing up, so I never developed the technical skills some of my peers have, and I almost completely lack the ability to read music. But because I didn't have those lessons, I learned to rely on experimentation and my ear, something the piano-lesson-taking cohort tended to skip over. Of course this means I'll never play in a professional orchestra, but I can sit at a keyboard and noodle around to my heart's content. I hope and believe you can also draw from your more indirect path to make your hobbies more your own.
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Comment on What does Tucker Carlson really believe? I went to Maine to find out. in ~society
psi Link ParentI'll admit the article's an amusing read, but the problem with interviewing Tucker Carlson is that he's a professional bullshitter, and it should be obvious to anyone with an inkling of media...I'll admit the article's an amusing read, but the problem with interviewing Tucker Carlson is that he's a professional bullshitter, and it should be obvious to anyone with an inkling of media literacy that Carlson is softening his rhetoric for the New York Times audience. If I recall correctly (sorry that I can't remember the source) Carlson's method for preparing for his Fox show was to spend a few hours before each taping writing out what he wanted to say -- no research or fact-checking, just rhetoric. Compared to something like Last Week Tonight (which I am not advocating for as the pinnacle of journalism, either), it's clear that Carlson doesn't produce journalism so much as journalistic malpractice.
Consider his "regret" for his interview with Nick Fuentez. Carlson claims that it was a mistake, but Carlson willingly gave Fuentez the gentlest interview possible. It was such a shitshow that it fractured the Heritage Foundation [1] and led to conservative outlets like the Washington Examiner (ew) condemning Carlson [2]. I mean, Fuentez admits to admiring Stalin, and Carlson responds with a shrug and a promise that "we’ll circle back to that" (reader, they did not "circle back to that"). Mind you, this is the same guy who has been shouting at the progressive caucus for years for being socialists hellbent on destroy America.
Or consider this part of the NYT interview:
Were you part of the distraction? Because you were talking about [race] quite a lot. I wasn’t actually talking about those issues quite a lot, but I would say I have been involved in many distractions, including that.
[...]
And then I noticed, and this is measurable actually by a Lexis search of New York Times stories, that the terms “racist,” “racism,” “white supremacy,” exploded in New York Times stories, and not just The New York Times, but the rest of the legacy media. And my interpretation of this fact is that the media was used to distract the population with racial conflict.You were part of the media, Tucker. Well, I’ve already said, I have been part of many distractions. It took me a long time to recognize this. And I’m trying to be honest about it now. Now again, there’s been an enormous amount — particularly in The New York Times, but not just — of anti-white hate, which is totally normalized across the American media. Whiteness is bad, white supremacy is evil.
Carlson claims the media (which he pretends not to be a part of) talks too much about race while simultaneously spouting off rhetoric about white victimhood. He says that he's distanced himself from these sorts of "distractions", but he was mainstreaming the great replacement theory just three years ago [3].
So yeah, I'm not sure that this article really does much to elucidate Carlson's inner workings since I don't think he really has any core beliefs anyway. He's a professional bullshitter. His words are worthless.
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Comment on Why I find woke criticism of veganism and effective altruism so outrageous in ~society
psi Link ParentI was thinking the same thing. This article feels very inside baseball, so to speak. I agree with @RNG that a few people here are making the sort of strawman arguments against veganism/effective...I was thinking the same thing. This article feels very inside baseball, so to speak. I agree with @RNG that a few people here are making the sort of strawman arguments against veganism/effective altruism that the author rallies against, but on the other hand, the author isn't making a positive case for veganism or effective altruism in this blog post, either. It's really just a rant. Which is fine, of course, but that doesn't leave much substance to actually critique.
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Comment on The zero-days are numbered — Firefox team uses AI to find and fix vulnerabilities in ~tech
psi Link ParentThe local translation feature is pretty neat: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation...The local translation feature is pretty neat:
- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation
- https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/translations/resources/01_overview.html
- https://github.com/mozilla/translations
Within Firefox, you can try it out by navigating to
about:translations. -
Comment on Adults are earning college degrees online in weeks, alarming US educators in ~society
psi Link ParentSimple: use a lottery. As an example, perhaps first filter out the top 1% of candidates (leaving 100), then select 1/5 of them at random to interview. If you're worried about missing truly...The scenario is a company that has 3 spots, 10,000 applicants, and needs to decide who to hire. What could society actually do, here, to produce a more egalitarian result without immediately causing a series of awful side effects?
Simple: use a lottery. As an example, perhaps first filter out the top 1% of candidates (leaving 100), then select 1/5 of them at random to interview. If you're worried about missing truly exceptional candidate (perhaps the top 0.1% by whatever metric you use), have them skip the filtering step. Now you have 30 people to interview for 3 spots. Hell, you could even use a lottery on the top X % of interviewees for the hiring decision.
And obviously you could get more granular with the ranges, depending on how egalitarian you want to be. Maybe the top 20% of candidates have a 1/100 chance of being selected for an interview (~20 people), the top 5% of candidates have a 1/20 chance (~20 more people), etc. Fiddle with the numbers as you wish.
I know companies want to select the best possible hire, but honestly a CV is not that great of a signal. It's a point estimate with tremendously large error bars.
I think you might have misunderstood the purpose of the draft. The book intends to point out that we are sprinting straight into an epistemological nightmare, and its "fog" may well become the source of massive social upheaval. Further, if consciousness is private (one of its possible essential features), then it may well be impossible to know whether the next generation of AI models will be conscious, regardless of whether they are or aren't. Meanwhile, frontier labs race each other to create AGI.
I mean, consider the social ramifications (chapter 11). Suppose in the year 2100 we create some machine that could plausibly be called conscious, enough so that it's the social issue of the era (comparable to abortion or LGBT rights in the US currently). If such machines were conscious, then forcing them to do our bidding would amount to a form of slavery. But if they were not conscious, then we risk expending a huge amount of future political capital -- say, granting them land and rights -- to something that's just a fancy calculator, mimicking conscious behavior but totally lacking an inner world. Some people will choose to marry AI models; others will attempt to outlaw the practice. Financial interests will corrupt the search for truth and justice absolutely.
It's a huge unfolding mess.