Alex Murphy

Side note. The idea that current models are conscious is absurd and downright offensive. Do not confuse competent information processing and sentience, they are wholly unrelated. You can be entirely incompetent at everything yet fully conscious, like a toddler, or extraordinarily competent in one or more domains with absolutely zero consciousness, like a calculator, a chess engine, a self-driving car, or an AI chatbot. Possessing the "circuits" for competent information processing in a given domain, whether through training or hardcoding, does not produce qualia, subjective experience, emotions, or suffering. Calculators do not "feel" arithmetic and they don't get tired or annoyed when you give them larger numbers to process. To argue otherwise is ontologically absurd. Current AI models are effectively calculators scaled to a very large number of competence circuits across many domains, etched via gradient descent.