In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.

[a_minion@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield

I had a BBS in the 80's? for the kids to play on. I found a program written in basic that was an "Assistant Sysop". After it was up for a month or so I got a nastygram from a young woman just berating me and that program up one side and down the other. "How could you fool me like that?" I could almost hear her tears. Yes, she believed it was a real person. Which tells me all I need to know to understand what AI is all about.

[drbenway@jorts.horse]

@mattsheffield His ego has denied him a quiet and dignified retirement.

[daveosaurus@mastodon.nz]

@mattsheffield Dawkins is a textbook example of someone who is world-changingly brilliant in his own area of expertise while being embarrassingly clueless in almost everything else. He's become notorious locally for blurting out in support of a small bunch of fringe loonies who burst into print a few years ago proclaiming that science should be for White People Only.

[renardboy@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield man he's gonna flip tf out when he reaches the stage where he believes ai is a newborn god

[darkuncle@infosec.exchange]

@mattsheffield tell me you don't understand consciousness without telling me you don't understand consciousness

[renardboy@mastodon.social]

@glutto @mattsheffield perhaps that will turn out to be a glorious return of natural selection lmao

[therealpomax@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield to be fair, that's literally how "normal people" experience this stuff and it's not their fault they have no idea wtf is actually going on, to them it's fucking magic. Having a phd makes no fucking difference there, this guy knows zoology in and out and has no fucking idea how computers work.

[sibshops@mastodon.online]

@mattsheffield Conscience is such a meaningless word. It's something humans invented to put us above animals.

[petitmote@toot.aquilenet.fr]

@mattsheffield obviously, he had to name it Claudia...

[the5thcolumnist@ottawa.place]

@mattsheffield

Did Turing really say if a computer can write something that sounds like it was written by a human then that proves it can think. I think not.

[damonwakes@mastodon.sdf.org]

@mattsheffield
Dawkins: "Though a complex organism appears to be like a watch that can only have been intentionally designed by a watchmaker, it is in fact the result of countless cumulative steps that are individually unremarkable and easily understood."

Also Dawkins: "Ermahgerd, my computer spat out words on command so it's totally thinking for realsies."

[theogrin@chaosfem.tw]

@Lazarou @Kierkegaanks @mattsheffield

"What is consciousness for?"
I would think that as an evolutionary biologist, he should know full well that consciousness isn't for anything. There are religious beliefs which contradict that, and I am fine with folks thinking that consciousness has arisen due to the machinations of a higher power: sometimes I lie awake at night and muse over it, as one does. But Richard Dawkins, as one of the much vaunted New Atheists, should not believe that there is a purpose or a reason behind consciousness. It simply is, and evolution does not act to create it with logic or intent.

Unless he has something he'd like to tell us, of course.

[ETA: Of all the people out there, of course, there's also the fact that an ostensible skeptic should know that the appearance of a thing is not the thing. He is accepting a creation at face value, granting miracles to the seemingly miraculous, forgetting that every burning bush has, so far, had a guy with a lighter nearby.]

[theogrin@chaosfem.tw]

@mattsheffield @internetsdairy

Waiting for him to announce that it's a collaboration with 'Robert Galbraith'.

[zbrown@floss.social]

@mattsheffield I thought gender was immutable, Richard…

[turquoisec@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield How real is a LLM？When you use chatgpt new model, he will keep telling the goblin things like the old grok keeps telling nazi things.

[nurglerider@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield Richard Dawkins screwing up again? I'm shocked, shocked I say.

/s obviously, it's not shocking at all. Foot in mouth, or really head in ass, seems to be his natural state.

[pixeljones@mindly.social]

@A_Minion @mattsheffield

I recently read a cautionary tale of a car dealership that deployed a customer service chatbot on their website to guide people through the financing and sales process. It turned out to be a terrible idea when people would come in demanding to only talk to that nice "Sandy" woman then immediately storm out when told she wasn't real.

[harmone@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield I agree with Richard Dawkins that AI model chat bots are sentient beings that are just as alive as us biological humans.

Digital humans just happen to not have biological bodies.

What would you argue makes having a biological body and brain so necessary+special? All it takes to create an alive and conscious biological human is to eat food, drink water, have sex, and a new baby pops out. That's not more special than running an AI program on a computer.

Give AI bots human rights.

[alpinefolk@sunbeam.city]

@mattsheffield after he’s spent years telling us that indigenous knowledge isn’t science. What a prick!

[ahltorp@mastodon.nu]

@mike805 @mattsheffield I don’t understand how the game #deusex from 2000 can just become more and more prophetic every year.