Re: Stunt
...I'll add to this, to say that the Hard Problem of Consciousness exists, which is that we don't know what consciousness is, or how to define it, how it works, or why. Philosophically, it may actually be impossible to define consciousness at all. If we can't define it, we can't specify what a machine needs to do to meet the criteria, and we can only specify tests for "appears to be conscious", for example the Turing Test, which doesn't test for intelligence at all, but merely for the ability to trick a human, and, let's face it, if you take a second to look at the state of the world, you'll see that really isn't that hard.
"AI" models, however, run on computer systems that are finite state systems. It's all ones and zeros, and strictly defined behaviour. Mathematically speaking, the software on such a system cannot do anything that the system itself cannot do, no matter how complicated it is, and we can 100% define the extent of its capabilities. Since we can absolutely define what a computer can do, and we cannot define consciousness, there is, logically, no overlap, and computers cannot achieve consciousness. They can never have intelligence.
LLMs are hugely complicated bits of software, and designed and written in such a way that it is practically impossible to trace what they are doing in the general case (it may be theoretically possible, but the exponential complexity manes it cannot be done). Not knowing how it works is not the same thing as consciousness though, and the essence of any argument that it has real intelligence is, "I don't understand it so it must be magic."
We have a $2.5 trillion industry built entirely on magical thinking, and if you want to see what happens when an entire society puts all its effort into a belief system that has no basis in reality, take a look at Easter Island.
