You expressed surprise that Herbert is a rabid conservative. I pointed out that the book you claim to like is a celebration of fascism.
Yeah, but that isn't why people like it.
Correct. People like Dune because it’s the biggest book they’ve read, not because they were paying attention to the prose or narrative quality of its insane plot.
Ironic comment, since Dune’s story is supernatural nonsense written by a misogynistic homophobe who probably does think the Bible is the greatest book of all time.
Although the movies are better than the books, the actual story is spectacularly awful. Have you ever had someone try to explain it to you? It’s unhinged. And the book is so poorly written from a literary perspective. Dune is Twilight for Gen-X’ers.
Frank Herbert is such a narcissist he actually accused Star Wars of ripping him off.
Since you missed it, let me explain the joke. Ahem: Kylie Jenner is a despicable billionaire who exploits poor girls for money. Touching anything that she has touched, including a hot guy, is disgusting. That’s the joke.
With a few notable exceptions (such as medicine), the more financially rewarding the job, the less hard you have to work. In fact, that’s the whole point of getting a career! By cultivating some rare skillset, you can do less work for more money. People don’t go into finance or consulting to “work hard.”
Why do you expect an unthinking, non-deliberative zombie process to know what you mean by “empower humanity”? There are facts about what is GOOD and what is BAD that can only be grasped through subjective experience.
When you tell it to reduce harm, how do you know it won’t undertake a course of eugenics? How do you know it won’t see fit that people like you, by virtue of your stupidity, are culled or sterilized?
if I'm wrong list a task that a conscious being can do that an unconscious one is unable to accomplish.
These have been listed repeatedly: love, think, understand, contemplate, discover, aspire, lead, philosophize, etc.
There are, in fact, very few interesting or important things that a non-thinking entity can do. It can make toast. It can do calculations. It can design highways. It can cure cancer. It can probably fold clothes. None of this shit is particularly exciting. Just more machines doing what they’re told. We want a machine that can tell us what to do, instead. That’s AGI. We don’t know how to build such a machine, at least given our current understanding of mathematical logic, theoretical computer science, and human cognition.
Feed it the entire internet and let it figure out what humans value
There are theorems in mathematical logic that tell us this is literally impossible. Also common sense.
And LLMs are notoriously stupid. Why would you offer them as an example?
I keep coming back to this: what we were discussing in this thread is the creation of an actual mind, not a zombie illusion. You’re welcome to make your half-assed malfunctional zombie LLM machine to do menial or tedious uncreative statistical tasks. I’m not against it. That’s just not what interests me.
Sooner or later humans will create real artificial minds. Right now, though, we don’t know how to do that. Oh well.
we're talking about something where nobody can tell the difference, not where it's difficult.
You’re missing the point. The existence of black holes was predicted long before anyone had any idea how to identify them. For many years, it was impossible. Does that mean black holes don’t matter? That we shouldn’t have contemplated their existence?
Economics is descriptive, not prescriptive. The whole concept of “a job” is made up and arbitrary.
You say an AGI would need to do everything a human can. Great, here are some things that humans do: love, think, contemplate, reflect, regret, aspire, etc. these require consciousness.
Also, as you conveniently ignored, philosophy, politics, science are among the most important non-family-oriented “jobs” we humans do. They require consciousness.
Plus, if a machine does what it’s told, then someone would be telling it what to do. That’s a job that a machine cannot do. But most of our jobs are already about telling machines what to do. If an AGI is not self-directed, it can’t tell other machines what to do, unless it is itself told what to do. But then someone is telling it what to do, which is “a job.”
You expressed surprise that Herbert is a rabid conservative. I pointed out that the book you claim to like is a celebration of fascism.
Correct. People like Dune because it’s the biggest book they’ve read, not because they were paying attention to the prose or narrative quality of its insane plot.