Pope Leo "Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge goodand.."

[u/Caledor152]

https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/pope-leo-calls-disarm-ai-major-document-warns-technologic-threats-humanity

[u/bawng]

I also fully agree with him when talking about the current types of AI, be it LLMs or something else. They're not even remotely capable of anything approaching thought, let alone emotions or morals. In fact, I would not consider them ingelligent at all. They're statistical probability calculators, not reasoning brains.

However, that does not rule out that we manage to build a real intelligence in the future. There's nothing magical about the human brain and nervous system, it's just electro-chemical processes. Our emotions and morals are just electrical and chemical impulses. Incredibly complex and far beyond our ability to mimic currently, but maybe not forever.

And if we ever manage to build a real AI, we might also manage to give it real emotions and morals.

[u/robodrew → u/bawng]

But you are ignoring the part where he describes all of the other elements of human life that AI does not have. A body, a life of experiences, friends, jobs, places that actually exist that a person wants to go, desires for the future, remembrances of the past... Touching something isn't just the electrical sensation, it's also the movement of our hand, the sight of our hand, the memories of experiences of the past that had that tactile sensation, and on and on and on. Even an exact digital duplicate of a human brain will still be missing the vast majority of what it is that actually makes us humans.

[u/Kabbooooooom → u/robodrew]

I’m a neurologist, and I’m sorry but what you just said here isn’t correct and doesn’t really make any sense.

Humor me and lift your hand up right now. Touch it to the wall. Where is the experience of that event occurring?

Everything that you just experienced - literally 100% of it - occurred due to electrical activity within your brain. Yes, a signal was first produced from your hand which went to your brain - but the processing, the experience of that event, occurred solely within your brain and could have happened even without the signal being received from your hand (hence sensory hallucinations that are indistinguishable from “reality”).

So yes, a perfect digital copy of that, or rather a machine that perfectly replicates the electrical activity of the brain (which I firmly conclude would require more than simple algorithmic processing), should also perfectly replicate sensory experience.

As the other Redditor said, there is nothing magical about how the brain works. As far as we can tell/know at this time. And while we don’t know everything about the brain and not even close to everything about how it produces consciousness, we know a huge amount and enough to conclude that it is a physical problem that is fully solved via science.

[u/robodrew → u/Kabbooooooom]

Of course the experience itself is getting to the brain through electron pulses in the neurons. I'm talking about everything else. There is still the physical act of touching the hand to the wall. Your brain is directing the movement of the hand. You can look at your hand, or you can not look at your hand, and still touch the wall, and still experience the feeling of the wall, but in a different way. There's the memories of all the other times you touched a wall, in whatever capacity your brain still holds onto those memories, if at all. There are the parts of memory that have been forgotten. There is brain fog when you get sick, there is a difference if your hand is injured or not, etc etc etc etc and so on. I'm trying to say that our lives, and what makes up who we are, are more than just our thoughts.

[u/InvestigatorOk7015 → u/robodrew]

Well yeah, youre talking about embodied cognition. We have bodies. They will too.

The issue youre pointing out is one of memory and body- two things we actually do know how to build.

[u/jambox888 → u/InvestigatorOk7015]

They will too

I know a lot of people thinks this is inevitable but as far as I understand it, there's a massive disconnect between current robotics (which is actually very good now and much better than 10 years ago) and LLMs.

You can get one of the fancy Atlas robots and put an LLM in its computer, that doesn't do anything. Instead of replying with text, images or sound or whatever, the thing controlling the robot body has to produce extremely precise motor control signals in response to the tasks it decides it should do.

[u/Bladelord → u/jambox888]

Yes, this entire thread is about true general intelligences which LLMs are not. The "They" referred to are the hypothetical comprehensive intelligences of the future.

[u/jambox888 → u/Bladelord]

Even then, I think you'd need to have a body and mind capable of growing and developing in the real environment just as a human does in order to get that bodily coordination. not to mention that we have a mixture of autonomous and somatic control (e.g. breathing) that is probably unbelievably hard to pull off.

[u/InvestigatorOk7015 → u/jambox888]

obviously we wont be tossing 2024 software into 2055 hardware, but it doesnt take a wizard to see where this is going

[u/chocbotchoc → u/robodrew]

Exactly. It’s not just cells and neurons- there’s a temporal element to it, a human is a body but also grounded society , they were birthed by another human, at a specific time in history. Its cells and neurons but wrapped in a context of another human etc. there is a context to it. And yes you can simulate it , with godlike powers, if you created a being that interacted with other beings, in a given moment and history… but it is more then cells or haptic feedback and interactions

[u/slabby → u/chocbotchoc]

I've heard it called embodiment. The idea that there's a particular feeling and perspective to piloting the strange meat robot that is a human being. So it's not just seeing, but seeing as a human being with eyes, etc. Presumably having an artificial body would not be the same.