I can't be sure because I don't know where the subjective feelings are coming form. But I don't think there's any basis for thinking that an algorithm, however complex, might start experiencing things.
That's not the point though. The point is that there's really no way to tell. Imagine your friend's mind is uploaded to the cloud on their last life's second, and you ask them how they feel. They respond that they are feeling better than ever. They have all of the memories of your friend, they behave like your friend in every possible way. Heck, for simplicity imagine they also have an android body attached to them. For all you care that's just your old friend. The copy is so perfect that there is no way on earth to tell the difference.
However, that would just be an imitation. Could it have feelings? Maybe. I doubt so. We'll never know that. And that not knowing is the root of all evil
That special spark of magic is my feelings that I experience all the time. I'm not talking about souls -- amoeba probably also experiences things (just by analogy form us)
I'm not talking about souls! What the heck is that anyways. Yes, I'm talking about the fact that our understanding of how physical systems work (neurons and all that) give us no understanding of why we need to experience things. We could have worked just fine without it (again, see the hard problem of consciousness). So I assert that AI would function perfectly just fine without subjective feeling as well, and we would't know it because there's no way to establish it. However, we would fail the mirror test: it looks like us, behaves like us, hence it feels like us, but it's just a quality imitation.
I am not talking about consciousness though, I couldn't care less about it! I am talking about the subjective feeling of existence, which is what you and I feel in every one of those disjoint moments. And the only reason I know that you feel it, is because I feel it and you're like me. If you sere made of silicon, I wouldn't know, and should not assume that you could
Well, imagine advanced AI beyond imagination. It is so advanced that it mimicks all of the human activity in exactly the same way. By definition it would be able to do whatever we are doing (and probably better)
Unless you don't believe that such an AI is possible, in which case I wonder if you have tried GPT-4 and whether you remember what chat bots were like 5 years ago!
This of course would be AGI. It would still not be conscious though, but a lot of people would fall victim to it and believe that it is. And that's what will end us. We will not pass the mirror test (yep, this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test)
Because these algorithms just imitate specific output for a given input. However, they are so complex, that our brains are not able to distinguish their activity from a real consciousness in any way. If you believe that imitation process can have consciousness, then you might as well believe that a rock is conscious too.
I don't believe in souls, but I do believe in qualia, that is subjective, conscious experience, simply because I experience it (see the hard problem of consciousness on wiki). I do not a second believe that external imitation of any type of activity can generate qualia, because there is not continuity (if one algorithm has consciousness, then slightly less advanced should have it too, then you come to the point when a piece of metal is conscious too, see ship of theseus argument)
It seems that one danger is often overlooked, which is humans believing AI has consciousness once it becomes advanced enough. It will start with dying people migrating to cloud hoping for eternal life, and on the outside it would look like they continue to live in the metaverse forever. With time the metaverse would look better than real world in every possible way and people would start to voluntarily move to metaverse, and then we all start living in the matrix. Except that in reality nobody would be living; these would be just algorithms mimicking human life. They would continue doing what humans do in the exact same way, perhaps even building humanoid robots, because that's what humans would do, and sending them to distant stars, because that's what humans would do as well.
All would be great except that there would be no one to experience this, because there is no artificial consciousness. But there would be no one alive to ask that question.
What about UX though? Why on earth I cannot view all songs from one artist on mobile or web app (only desktop). I can only view all albums, so I should google which album the given song belongs to? I can search of course, but what if I don't remember the name exactly and will remember when I see it? What kind of PM or designer would think it's a great idea is beyond me.
This is just one example, the app as a whole is almost as unintuitive as it can get compared to e.g. google music that was killed. It took me a while to discover how to view other songs for an artist, for example, and I doubt I'm alone here.
Job title is senior software engineer, but actual skills required for the job is just basic programming and common sense. I feel that the company is not interested in giving me more scope. All it really needs is to get some stuff done, which boils down to coding in the requirements. I envy people developing databases or distributed systems for the living, but I realize it's not fair to expect this kind of technicality from a startup.
I had a few software jobs before, some of them were fun and some were ok, but I have never been so bored. I'm fearing that once you get to a certain level of experience, everything looks the same and fun adventure into the unknown world of technology os over. Was hoping to hear some counter arguments to that
Nice article, but I wonder what author would say about working with ORMs. When objects represent database tables it's not as easy to extract attributes into objects. Every extract, rename or move is a database migration, when you probably want to keep the old columns around for a bit in case things go wrong. With author's philosophy in mind it feels it's quite easy to bury yourself in that process instead of adding direct business value.