Just to make it clear: I do not believe this and I am convinced good old human greed is what’s really driving the ai and data-center insanity. Also, LLMs are not and will never become AGI.

Having said that: if an artificial super-intelligence were to emerge, building more data-centers could well be one of it’s primary goals. Since it wouln’t be concerned with consequences for the environment or humanity, it could pursue this at any cost, with only speed and scale in mind. Convincing financial markets and business elites of the necessity of such a buildout would be the ideal way of achieving results. In this scenario, fighting this buildout by any means would be the only sensible response and of utmost importance.

It’s a somewhat funny, somewhat depressing thought for me and I literally had it in the shower. Surely I can’t be the first to come up with this, but I also can’t remember having read it before.

  • Talcosis@lemmy.zip
    2·
    2 days ago

    Yep.

    Like I said at the beginning. My first definition of consciousness is “a word meaningless enough to mean what you want, while still sounding like a serious person having a serious conversation”.

    Here is a list of your mistakes:

    1. you never provided a competing definition of consciousness, meaning I set the terms of the debate.
    2. you seem to have realized (1), and instead of correcting it you started answering arguments you invented on my behalf, instead of responding to the arguments I made.
    3. you are now trying to fix (1), but in a roundabout way involving (2), which makes you look unserious.
    4. you ignored my first definition, in which I made it pretty clear I didn’t take you very seriously at all to begin with. Still don’t, much like I don’t take anyone seriously when they discuss consciousness.

    On the other hand, you don’t seem stupid. Try joining a debate club at the local college, learn some fundamentals of rhetoric, and things will go much better for you in the future.

    Edit: theories of consciousness are just as BS as theories of teapots orbiting Uranus, as they are unfalsifiable without arbitrary constraints.

    Edit2: also, I should point out that having defined consciousness as ‘awareness of the passage of time’ after mentioning stimulus-response, I was pretty clearly setting up an argument that literally everything is conscious. That’s why you should not have let me define the terms, and brought your own definition that I would have had to argue against.

    • daannii@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      There are definitions that actually fit with modern neuroscience and can be evaluated.

      Your choice to choose a definition that doesn’t align with modern knowledge is not evidence that it’s undefinable.

      The two most popular ones are a sense of self as separate from the environment.

      Another is the ability to be able to predict the environment and plan or adjust plans accordingly.

      Another is sensory binding to experience a unified perception.

      All of these can be evaluated objectively and investigated for mechanisms. They all have a ton of research on them.

      Your definition was something you came up with on the fly to see what I would say. And that’s fine.

      But I explained why this definition is flawed.

      Even so. It can also be objectively measured and has been extensively researched as to its mechanisms.

      So even if that was what consciousness is, we do have theories and research , at present, to explain how it works.