Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:I donno... (Score 1) 186

Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.

LK

Don't agree at all and I think that's a morally dangerous approach. We're looking for a scientific definition of "desire" and "want". That's almost certainly a part of "conscious" and "self aware". Philosophy can help, but in the end, to know whether you are right or not you need the experimental results.

Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.

One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.

LK

Comment Re:I donno... (Score 2) 186

An LLM can't suddenly decide to do something else which isn't programmed into it.

Can we?

It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.

Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.

LK

Comment Re:Uranium availability [Re:More nuclear energy y. (Score 1) 197

If we needed to power the world on uranium fission, we could extract uranium from seawater. There is an estimated 4.5bn tonnes of uranium dissolved in seawater - if we extracted 10% of that, that would last 5,000 years at current consumption rates and without breeder reactors.

Breeder reactors can take us to millions of years, by which point, we may well have perfected other forms of energy production, population may have shrunk enough to make completely renewable energy sources more than adequate.

With nuclear, we could even contemplate actively scrubbing some CO2 from the atmosphere, converting it into oil, and pumping it underground, effectively reversing climate change. In fact, instead of sending money to poorer countries to help address future climate risk impacts, if richer countries actually put money into reversing their own contributions to climate change, that would actually be a worthwhile endeavour.

Slashdot Top Deals

Can't open /usr/fortunes. Lid stuck on cookie jar.

Working...