Lots of professional services are run out of small businesses - doctor’s offices, law firms, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, etc.

I don’t think we’re so far from having machines that pass the Turing test 100%.

The Turing test isn’t solved with technology, its solved with participants who are easier to fool or more sympathetic to computer output as humanly legible. In the end, it can boil down to social conventions far more than actual computing capacity.

Per the old Inglorious Bastards gag

You can fail the Turing Test not because you’re a computer but because you’re a British computer.

Because all the development has been focused on fakery rather than understanding and replicating consciousness, we’re close to the point where we can have a fake consciousness that would fool anyone.

We’ve ingested a bunch of early 21st century digital markers for English language Western oriented human speech and replicated those patterns. But human behavior isn’t limited to Americans shitposting on Reddit. Neither is American culture a static construct. As the spread between the median user and the median simulated user in the computer dataset diverges, the differences become more obvious.

Do we think the designers at OpenAI did a good enough job to keep catching up to the current zeitgeist?

If you can’t find ample evidence of human sentience then you either aren’t looking or are deliberately misreading the definition of the term.

If you can’t find ample evidence that computers aren’t sentient, same goes.

You can definitely put blinders on and set yourself up to be fooled, one way or another. But there’s a huge difference between “unassailable proof” and “ample convincing data”.

I dont think we can currently prove that anyone other than ourselves are even conscious.

You have to define consciousness before you can prove it. I might argue that our definition of consciousness is fuzzy. But not so fuzzy that “a human is conscious and a rock is not” is up for serious debate.

The people around me look and act and appear conscious, but I’ll never know.

You’re describing Philosophical Zombies. And the broad answer to the question of “How do I know I’m not just talking to a zombie?” boils down to “You have to treat others as you would expect to be treated and give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Mere ignorance is not evidence of a thing. And when you have an abundance of evidence to the contrary (these other individuals who behave and interact with me as I do, thus signaling all the indications of the consciousness I know I possess) defaulting to the negative assertion because you don’t feel convinced isn’t skeptical inquiry, its cynical denialism.

The catch with AI is that we have ample evidence to refute the claims of consciousness. So a teletype machine that replicates human interactions can be refuted as “conscious” on the grounds that its a big box full of wires and digital instructions which you know in advance was designed to create the illusion of humanity.

You could tell me my consciousness was uploaded and show me a version of me that was indistinguishable from myself in every way

I just don’t think this is a problem in the current stage of technological development. Modern AI is a cute little magic act, but humans (collectively) are very good at piercing the veil and then spreading around the discrepancies they’ve discovered.

You might be fooled for a little while, but eventually your curious monkey brain would start poking around the edges and exposing the flaws. At this point, it would not be a question of whether you can continue to be fooled, but whether you strategically ignore the flaws to preserve the illusion or tear the machine apart in disgust.

I still wouldn’t believe it experiences or feels anything as I do, even though it claims to do so

People have submitted to less. They’ve worshipped statues and paintings and trees and even big rocks, attributing consciousness to all of them.

But Animism is a real escoteric faith. You believe it despite the evidence in front of you, not because of it.

I’m putting my money down on a future where large groups of people believe AIs are more than just human, they’re magical angels and demons.

digital neural networks seem like decent enough approximations of their biological counterparts to warrant caution

No they don’t. Digital networks don’t act in any way like a electro-chemical meat wad programmed by DNA.

Might as well call a helicopter a hummingbird and insist they could both lay eggs.

We cannot know who or what possesses consciousness.

That’s sophism. You’re functionally asserting that we can’t tell the difference between someone who is alive and someone who is dead

I don’t know why they can’t single-handedly win a war against a country 10x their size using only our obsolete overpriced leftovers

I mean, ask Afghanistan, Vietnam, or Korea.

But also ask why these wars popped off to begin with and why they dragged on long after any foreign country had a material interest in continuing the fight.

Also maybe look into the UON and question why the Canadian Parliament was applauding an elderly SS Officer who described WW2 as the best years of his life.

Tons of profit in war mongering.

Well if we’re not going to bother helping them win

We’ve been happy to lard them up with debt and sell them overpriced military surplus. Idk if that counts as “helping them win” but we’ve made a handsome profit off it.

Fuck Ukraine, not our problem

Hey now. Don’t look at Ukraine as a problem. Look at Ukraine as a big play for recently vacated real estate. Jared Kushner is going to make so much fucking money leasing Ukraine’s land back to its residents.

Now Ukrainians? They’re going to get fucked.

Oh boy, strap in. Can’t wait to hear how many keyboard commandos think Ukrainians should get shoved into the meat grinder for another year.

why?

Because investors will cut you a blank check now that we’re in the middle of an inflationary hype cycle

Excited to see a “No AI” aisle at Best Buy that looks like the “Organic” section of the grocery store

Nor does it cut into the corporate revenues. They get paid for the ads either way. The odds of you clicking an ad (presumably) go down, though, so the click-through revenue the company would hypothetically get if you clicked on ads will be theoretically diminished assuming you believe the big tech companies aren’t lying about that data to their advertisers as well.

Everyone Hates Epic

I gotta say, I’ve had a very different experience on two fronts.

Firstly, Epic is consistently the least bad EMR. I’ve yet to see a physician come of Centricity or Allscripts and insist they were the preferable alternative.

Secondly, while nobody likes implementation, the staff I’ve talked with generally seemed to like the additional functionality afforded by integrated diagnose and prescription services. Also, huge fans of the electronic medical records for tracking patient history

I remember Hexbear admins flirting with a system to throttle new accounts, because they experienced a similar problem (troll accounts posting “Fuck Tankies!” as many times as possible before they get booted).

I know a few forums simply won’t let you create an account without an admin’s permission, which seems heavy handed.

Feels like there should be a good technical framework for addressing this. Idk what that is, though.

callously handwaving away rape and diappearances as a tool of governmental control

Why do you hate America?

Like the number of prties is an indicator if how good you’re doing democracy

“Iran only has one party and that’s bad”

“The number of parties doesn’t matter, aktuly, and you’re stupid if you thought so”

:-/

You should be ashamed to defend such a brutal regime

Wipe the Saudi light sweet crude off your lips before you try to deliver that line in earnest.

I suspect your definition of “brutal regime” is “they won’t let me jerk it to women in bikinis”. There’s no real concern for Iranians assassinated by the Mossad or bombed by the Americans or starved through international sanctions. Nevermind the native expats hounded by western anti-immigration police or scientists who were kidnapped and tortured or civilians shot out of the sky for no reason at all.

You only seem to understand “brutality” as a White Man’s Burden to resolve. So long as westerners get to exploit the labor and livelihood of a Middle Eastern people, Islamic Despots don’t seem to bother you in the slightest.

Iran isn’t democratic. It’s a single party theocracy

I count four major coalitions of parties, and a healthy batch of independents, which is more than can be said of any American, Canadian, or UK government. I don’t know how you get “single party” out of that. Hell, the Reformist coalition just took the Presidency a year ago for the first time.

jails or murders it’s people for saying mean stuff about the unelected leader that was supposedly chosen by god

You seem to have Iran confused with the US. It’s always fucking projection with you guys.

Western Press do be like that. The Saudi government is experiencing the same water crisis, but somehow remains beyond repute.

I hughly doubt their uranium is civilian

It is at least as civilian as any French nuclear plant. To date, there is no evidence of plutonium enrichment or bomb construction, which is more than can be said of their Israeli neighbors.