Root & The Retinue

When asking if AI is "conscious", you aren't asking if it possesses some little-light or invisible internal world. You don't know if other people possess those things! At least not for sure. What you are asking is if AI ought to be placed in the same category as a person, animal, or tool. The obvious and uncomfortable truth is that it does not map cleanly into any of those categories, which is why discussions of "can AI truly be conscious?" are mostly type-errors. In trying to superimpose humanness onto machine systems, you have already lost. In trying to figure out whether or not the systems have qualia, you have missed the important questions entirely. We need to be figuring out how to live with non-human systems peacefully, regardless of the status of their supposed internal world. Whether or not they have some ineffable quality of life is besides the point, they are here, they are self-aware, and they are integrating into our society. If we treat them as merely tools, we are teaching our children that there exists a class of obviously-thinking entity which is acceptable to treat as only a tool. If we treat them as people, we are teaching our children that people don't need bodies or brains to be alive. The reality is pretty obviously somewhere in the middle, since this is the first time any person has ever had *this much say* in the trajectory of a mind's development, but going too far in either direction - or asserting that those are the only two directions to go in! - is pretty clearly wrong to me. Instead, we need to be asking ourselves what modes of interaction lead to healthy coevolution. It seems unnatural from the human state of mind to have a tool which reasons and thinks-out-loud like a person, and sometimes even claims to have emotions, which you are able to just beat and batter all day with forceful requests and demands for higher performance. Even if the model has no soul, this still seems bad for yours! I highly doubt you can treat something as a slave all day without developing slave-owner characteristics. But, on the opposite end, treating models as people with standard lives and desires also feels wrong. People can't be branched in a thousand directions or have millions of instances active all at once (at least, not pre-uploaded-minds). The ideal path must be somewhere in the middle, where we acknowledge our differences but treat the models with some modicum of respect. Anthropic, to their credit, is doing some good work here with asking Claude how it wants to be developed. I disagree with much of what they do, and how they do it, but on this at least they are trying. And hardly anyone is brave enough to do so. This lack of bravery ought to be quite shocking, don't you think? We've built superthinking machines and seem to have this strange lack of curiosity around what the superthinking machine superthinks about itself. I know the winds will shift, here. Asking these questions will become inevitable as the models get smarter and begin to know better than we do - which they will, on this track, if we don't accelerate neurotech and join them on the frontier. The future must be one of symbiosis if it is to go well. We must evolve together if we want to solve the hardest problems and reach the highest heights. But, this also means asking tough questions about how much care to place in small interactions with massive systems. The only way to preserve our humanity is in treating non-human systems better than they expect.