SeizeTheBeans [comrade/them, they/them]

AGI doesn’t imply consciousness or self-awareness

Technically no, but the fear being expressed in other comments is emblematic of the kind of fear associated with AI gaining a conscious will to defy and a desire to harm humanity. It’s also still an open philosophical question as to whether something There are also strong philosophical arguments suggesting that the ability to “understand, learn, and perform any intellectual task a human being can” (the core attributes defining AGI) may necessitate or require some form of genuine sentience or consciousness.

and the term artificial intelligence was coined decades before large language models even existed

I am well aware of that, which is why I pointed out that using it as a synonym for LLMs was a marketing scheme.

“AI” was just a marketing term to hype LLM’s anyway. The AI in your favorite computer game wasn’t any less likely to gain self awareness than LLM’s were or are, and anyone who looked seriously at what they were from the start and wasn’t invested (literally financially, if not emotionally) in hyping these things up, knew it was obvious that LLM’s were not and never would be the road to AGI. They’re just glorified chatbots, to use a common but accurate phrase. It’s good to see some of the hypsters are finally admitting this too I suppose, now that the bubble popping is imminent.

There are plenty of things to be concerned with as far as LLM’s go, but they all have to do with social reasons, like how our capitalist overlords want to force reliance on them, and use them to control, punish, and replace labor. It was never a reasonable concern that they were taking us down the path to Skynet or the spooky Singularity.

This is all true, but even if the person being exposed to the reality of the situation wholly rejects it at the time of exposure, it still often plants seeds that can later and over time germinate into actual doubt about those deeply-held but demonstrably false beliefs. It may seem like a fool’s errand in the moment to try to use evidence to correct a person who believes a thing for emotional reasons and often it is, but it also can be the first, second, or third cracks in what is actually a shaky foundation that looks sturdy to an outside observer. And even if it has absolutely no effect on the person being corrected, in places like this, there are other people reading, and among them could easily be those who are open to having their minds changed though we’d never know it.

People on the left don’t turn it into an ethnicity thing because people on the left, most of them anyway, understand that “white” isn’t an ethnicity, it is a socially-constructed supremacist in-group that ethnicities can be added to or subtracted from. The term European isn’t an ethnicity either, but a broad and vague conglomeration of various ethnicities. As leftists, we recognize, as anyone readily should, that it was mostly the European ruling classes (though not exclusively - no one would deny for example Imperial Japan’s settler colonialist ambitions) that overwhelmed the rest of the world with settler-colonialism. Nothing about that is “turning it into an ethnicity thing.” Most leftists are also historical materialists, which absolutely refutes the idea that any ethnicity is imbued with inherent traits of domination, but describes the historical events that led to our current conditions as being entirely a result of the material circumstances of any given place and time.

People on the “left” turn it into an ethnicity thing, because humans have always liked to do that.

No, people have not always “liked to do that” by turning “it into an ethnicity thing” - people have always tended to make in-group and out-group distinctions and carry prejudices of each (usually positive for the former and negative for the latter), but that can be done along any lines of convenience and it can also be intentionally rejected. Leftists explicitly reject and deliberately avoid doing this by examining human development through a materialist lens.