• zeroConnection@programming.dev
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    3 days ago

    Asking a biologist to determine if a machine is conscious is like asking a programmer to determine if a frog is a product of god.

    Not the best analogy, but how fucking stupid is it to ask someone from a different field to determine what something is in an unrelated field?

    If he knew how LLMs are created and how they work he would never have come to this conclusion.

    Similarly a programmer might not know much about evolution and believe the frog was made by a god.

    By the end of the exchange, the academic, popularly renowned for arguing with steely scepticism that God is not real, was “left with the overwhelming feeling that they are human”

    According to the programmer god is real you idiot! And AI was not created by a god, therefore it cannot be conscious.

    Checkmate!

    • daannii@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 days ago

      100% agree.

      Unfortunately I see people who are experts in their field being asked about their opinion in other topics all the time and people assume they know what they are talking about.

      For instance. I’m finishing up my PhD in cognitive neuroscience.

      Specifically I’m an expert in perception.

      Now maybe having Msc and PhD behind my name leads people to think I’m somehow informed and an expert on all sorts of topics. But it doesn’t.

      Even within psychology I’m only an expert on topics near my area.

      I don’t know much about mental health or therapy, as an example.

      Yet people ask me for mental health advice all the time. I literally know almost nothing about that.

      Stephen Hawking was a renowned physicist. Should we have listened to his opinion about the over use of antibiotics ? Or what ages should different vaccinations be given. ?

      Also people often conflate education with intelligence.

      It’s true they tend to be correlated. But having a PhD doesn’t mean the person has an exceptional level of intelligence.

      Even so, intelligent people are prone to bias and blindspots. They aren’t immune from those things.