Pregnant people must scare you. As do synthetic bacterial cells, artificially synthesized viruses, cloning, organoids, etc.

I think there’s a misunderstanding. What I’m saying is that just because we can create artificially synthesized viruses and such, that does not mean that creating conscious AI life is the relatively simple next step.

When Giovanni Aldini made a dead guy open his eyes and sit up, people thought that meant that the resurrection of the dead was just around the corner. But it wasn’t and it still ain’t.

Just like there’s a huge gap between making a corpse flop around and resurrection, there is a huge gap between creating viruses and creating conscious AI life. Especially on laptops and smartphones.

Define “god-like” if you do not mean it in a religious manner.

Like I said, Q from Star Trek is god-like. The aliens in Roadside Picnic are god-like. These aren’t religious characters. To the chimpanzees, we’re god-like.

Technically, I doubt homo sapiens will develop conscious life. But it’s maybe possible for which ever branch that evolves from us to do it. Millions of years from now.

Regarding your question: it makes sense to continue research and educate people, yes.

You misunderstood. That’s not my question. What I’m saying is that creating conscious AI life is a massive technological leap, if it’s even possible. It would be beyond bizarre for some dipshit in our current civilization to accidentally create it on their laptop and torture it. My question is: Do you think this is really happening right now?

Are you really requiring that we allow research in one field only after we have advanced research in another entirely different field? That seems arbitrary.

No.

Up until the 80s, there was still some debate over whether wiretaps should be legal. It’s sad that we have come to accept them as normal.

This is just ass coverage for the company. They’re not going to pursue it. They just didn’t want to get sued for not reporting it if she did commit a mass shooting. The prosecution though might.

It would have made an interesting ST: TNG episode where the Federation orders the Enterprise to attack a planet where the National Potato Council claims there are pirates writing replicator software to distribute free food. Meanwhile, the B plot is Data struggling to manage his subscriptions to holodeck sims.

I’m not asking to prove any point but to collectively explore why we - you and I - feel the way we do. Because I sure as shit struggle to explain why I feel uneasy about the fly torture but not as uneasy about LLM torture.

LLMs aren’t programmed to feel excruciating pain, fear, terror, and dread like living things. Counterstrike bots have been programmed to feel fear since the 2000s. Pacman ghosts have been living in terror since 1980. But we don’t feel bad for them because we know it’s not real. It’s an illusion. It’s the same with LLMs.

This is image is based on another meme where they’re saying “I’m alive”.

We’re creating life the same way Giovanni Aldini resurrected the dead and inspired Shelley to write Frankenstein. And god-like isn’t religious mumbo jumbo. That’s standard sci fi talk. Q is god-like. It doesn’t necessitate progress in such directions, but it is a huge indicator.

Does it make sense for a species with a type 0 civilization to create conscious life long before it can even reach the nearest star? That’s like chimpanzees going from fishing for termites with sticks to building a Wankel engine over the weekend.

It foreshadows an issue that will be a reality one day nevertheless. The work on AI continues. We may one day very well have conscious AI.

Maybe when our species evolves into sentient shades of blue. Humanity will have to become godlike before creating life. A simple test to gauge whether we’re on the verge of creating conscious AI is to look around and ask “Is humanity godlike today?” If not, don’t worry about conscious AI.

Dear Government. Quit trying to turn the Internet into 1980s cable TV. There’s a lot of us out here using it for its original purpose instead shopping and watching Netflix.

It’s not that there are less websites. It’s that google doesn’t work anymore and you can’t find them.

I have an idea for an instance called MentatSearch or something where everyone joins and if it gets like a 100,000+ subscribers then when people are looking for something online, they can ask there and inevitably someone will know it off the top of their head.

Kind of like r/identifythisfont on Reddit. There’s like 150,000+ font nerds there and if you post an image of a font, it gets identified within a half hour.