Wow. Richard Dawkins off the deep end.
‘So my own position is: “If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?”’
First he goes on and on about the Turing test like it is some kind of law handed down. Like, the fact that sequences of output tokens so closely resemble speech they might pass Turing’s test. He views a moving of the goalpost (Turing’s test apparently isn’t enough to distinguish consciousness) as unreasonable. Like Turing got it right and it’s wrong to say otherwise.
And then he has these risible conversations: ‘I then asked her whether, when she read my novel, she read the first word before the last word. No, she read the whole book simultaneously.’ Let’s not ignore the ‘she’. The thing has a name. ‘Claude.’ It implies a gender. But Richard Dawkins genders it and genders it female. I don’t think that’s a random thing.
We know how computers work. It absolutely does read the book byte-by-byte, in a sequential series of input tokens. It does not matter that the thing output some words that said otherwise. It is wrong. Why doesn’t it matter that the output is plainly incorrect? Where does the disconnection between the reality and the words come into the picture?
This is just drivel.
