In some of my previous posts, I have joked that if we had been around four billion years ago when carbon-based life first arose on this planet, that we would probably have not even noticed. And if we had noticed, we would probably still be arguing today over what exactly had happened. In this post, I would like to suggest that the very same thing may be happening now with the rise of ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence).
GPT-4 was partially released by OpenAI on March 14, 2023, and we immediately began to see videos on YouTube with end users showing it off and wondering how close we now are to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Is it only me, or have we already reached ASI but just have not recognized that we have done so? It seems to me that all of these new advanced chatbots are now failing the Turing Test because we know that no human being could ever be this smart. Isn't that the very definition of ASI? For example, I put myself on the waitlist for the new Bing Chat a while back. Microsoft has since announced that Bing Chat uses GPT-4 customized for searching the Internet. Luckily for me, I was granted access to the new Bing Chat just a few days after I had to begin to do some family legal work as the executor for a family member's estate that must now go through probate in the State of Illinois. Using Bing Chat is like having a personal lawyer who immediately returns calls and has a fantastic bill rate of $0/hour. With Bing Chat, I was able to make all the necessary cremation arrangements, I learned that wills must have original signatures - copies of wills are not recognized by probate courts, how to use an Illinois Small Estate Affidavit to get a bank to tell you if an account is over $100,000 and the estate must therefore go through probate, how to get a certified copy of a divorce decree, all the steps in going through probate without a lawyer with links to websites with detailed explanations of each step, how to move cars without titles and the best towing companies in the area. No single human being could ever have helped me with all of that because nobody is that smart. For me, that is ASI.
So why is everybody still wondering if we have reached AGI yet when it is pretty obvious that we have already run past AGI and into ASI without even noticing? I think this is so because people are really wondering if these advanced chatbots are conscious sentient beings. In The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness and DishBrain - Cortical Labs Creates an AI Matrix for Pong With Living Neurons on a Silicon Chip, I explained that most people simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people, consciously or subconsciously, consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. Now, in everyday life, such a self-model is a very useful delusion like the delusion that the Sun, planets and stars all revolve about us on a fixed Earth. In truth, each of us tends to self-model ourselves as an immaterial Mind with a consciousness that can interact with other immaterial Minds with consciousness too, even though we have no evidence that these other Minds truly do have consciousness. After all, all of the other Minds that we come into contact with on a daily basis could simply be acting as if they were conscious Minds that are self-aware. Surely, a more accurate self-model would be for us to imagine ourselves as carbon-based robots. More accurately, in keeping with the thoughts of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, softwarephysics models humans as DNA survival machines and Meme Machines with Minds infected with all sorts of memes. Some of those memes are quite useful and some are quite nasty.
So perhaps people are really internally struggling when working with an ASI chatbot because they do not know if the ASI chatbot is a sentient being or not. The ASI chatbot seems to have a Mind and a personality like other people but can it really think like a human? And if it is thinking, what is it thinking about other than my latest query? Some might even wonder if chatbots can go to heaven if they hold certain beliefs or at least pretend to do so.
Figure 1 – The original ASI chatbot, the HAL 9000, starred in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.
Figure 2 – Apparently, GPT-5 will be able to read your lips.
Figure 3 – So be sure to cover the webcam on your laptop when using GPT-5!
Comments are welcome at
scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
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