This is one of my favorite books and it's fun to read for anyone interested in the AI consciousness debate. <a href="https://hpmorpodcast.com/blindsided-00-announcement/" rel="nofollow">https://hpmorpodcast.com/blindsided-00-announcement/ is a podcast that read the book last year. And <a href="https://blindsight.space/" rel="nofollow">https://blindsight.space/ is a Watts' approved website that has a short film/movie trailer for the book.
I read Blindsight long before modern LLM AI came about and at the time I thought the aliens being intelligent without being conscious was fascinating and gave me a different perspective that those things could be separated but it didn't have and direct application.
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
I've just skimmed the Wikipedia entry you linked:
"Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins."
"Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."
So it turns out I'm not conscious either and incapable of semantic understanding, because I've ignored the ambiguities too. Though note that parsing ambiguous sentences used to be exactly what pre-LLM AIs could not do, and what we thought of as requiring real understanding.
sxp · · focus · HN ↗
SigmundA · · focus · HN ↗
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consciousness" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consc...
throw310822 · · focus · HN ↗
I've just skimmed the Wikipedia entry you linked:
"Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."So it turns out I'm not conscious either and incapable of semantic understanding, because I've ignored the ambiguities too. Though note that parsing ambiguous sentences used to be exactly what pre-LLM AIs could not do, and what we thought of as requiring real understanding.
adastra22 · · focus · HN ↗