Let’s talk about the singularity

The concept of the technological singularity is a confused one. Here’s the thing about “general AI” or “self-aware AI”—it will be indistinguishable from really good mimicry of self-aware intelligence. When the singularity happens, we won’t notice. This is an excerpt of a YouTube comment on a video about AI technology. I thought about responding to…

The imperfect Chinese room (a note on the conditions for AI consciousness)

First, a note about the obvious racism: western philosophy has long used China as the prototypical example of the foreign. In the Chinese room thought experiment, the Chinese language is used because it is not understood by the person. Ultimately, Chinese is being likened to machine code, notoriously unreadable by humans. This is not the…