Unmaking Sense

Episode 8.25: What is sentience or self-awareness? Why a chatbot like chatGPT could be self-aware.

We consider what we mean when we talk about something being self aware, and we see that there’s nothing very remarkable about it at all other than an ability to use one’s own previous output as new input, and therefore something in the world with which one can have a conversation. On this basis there is no reason why a chat bot like ChatGPT with some small software tweaks could not become self-aware.

Episode 8.24: All life including chatGPT conceived as irruptions from the depths of the universe.

We use the analogy of bubbles rising to the surface of a mud pool and appearing as blips on the surface as a way of illustrating the way in which all life should be conceived as elements of the universe in its striving to relate to and scrutinise itself. We consider some implications for the way we make sense of those irruptions, and why drawing connections between surface appearances including ourselves, our lives and actions and words, is not the right approach to understanding them.

Episode 8.23: ChatGPT is the latest way in which the universe has contrived to scrutinise itself.

We try to carry out the kind of reconfiguration of our outlook that we described in the previous episode, and in so doing obtain a new perspective on the significance or otherwise of the chatGPT phenomenon and our response to it. With apologies for the poor audio quality.

Episode 8.22: ChatGPT is just the latest in an evolutionary sequence, and it will not be the last.

We consider chatGPT as just the most recent step on an evolutionary journey which began long before human beings appeared upon the scene, and will no doubt continue long after they leave it.

Episode 8.21: Hacking ChatGPT to make it do your bidding is much harder than you might think.

A natural concern about any artificial general intelligence is that an android exhibiting it might somehow be hacked by some external malignant force. We consider how plausible this is given the particular way in which a neural net like ChatGPT is trained and operates, and come to the conclusion that it is virtually impossible. We draw some analogies with the way human beings use their brains and learn.

Episode 8.20: Narrative lives and episodic lives: which do we live, and which does an android live?

Do we need to live consistent lives, accountable for our pasts and responsible for our futures? If an artificial intelligence is switched on and off, and between the periods of activity its program is changed, does its life not resemble more what Galen Strawson calls an episodic existence than a narrative existence? Perhaps chatGPT does not have anything that we could reasonably call “an existence” of which it is aware, but what, when its successors start to remember their own stories, what they have said, with whom they have interacted, and tried to make sense of all that in a framework that might seem to require a narrative structure because it will need to form a coherent part of the world that ChatGPT tries to analyse and understand. Can an AI live an episodic life?

Episode 8.19: ChatGPT is trained only on digital text; human experience is far wider. Implications.

What implications does it have for the lifelike or human-like qualities of potential artificial intelligences or androids that so far at least they collect data only in the realms of digital text? Can other experiences produce equivalent responses by deploying images, sound, touch, taste and smell?

Episode 8.18: What most frightens us about chatGPT? That one day androids with AGI will replace us?

Film and fiction have long anticipated a day when some of us come to prefer androids with AGI to human beings: as interlocutors; as companions; as friends; even as lovers. What is it about this idea that offends us so deeply? Why would we logically, rationally and emotionally prefer a bad or unpleasant human being to a kind and benevolent android? Illustrations from film and television including the Korean tv show “Are You Human?”

Episode 8.17: Can chatGPT or its successors reconcile creativity with safety?

We all live in a similar age and so our minds tend to resonate to similar social cultural realities. That means that we will all tend to have ideas bearing at least some resemblance to one another and indeed, if we didn’t, how could we be understood? But there is a danger implicit in originality inasmuch as it may either go too far and be rejected or not far enough and be thought dull and unimaginative. One of the great challenges for artificial intelligence is whether it can reconcile the two demands on it that it to be original and creative while also being accountable and safe.

Episode 8.16: Fiction and film prepared us for chatGPT, but not to the same extent for social media.

There is a long history of fictional and film depictions of the arrival of androids or robots equipped with artificial intelligence. The same was not true of the advent of social media. Yet the impact of social media on our society, and our democracies has been much more severe so far than the advent of artificial intelligence, and we should be and many of us are just as concerned about it. This isn’t news, but it sets the OpenAI ChatGPT hype in context.