I didn’t think I’d sit and watch this whole thing but it is a very interesting conversation. Near the end the author says something like “I know people I’m the industry who work in these labs who act like they’ve seen a ghost. They come home from work and struggle with the work they do and ask me what they should do. I tell them they should quit then, and then they stop asking me for advice.”
I do wonder at times if we would even believe a whistleblower should one come to light, telling us about the kind of things they do behind closed doors. We only get to see the marketable end product. The one no one can figure out how it does what it does exactly. We don’t get to see the things on the cutting room floor.
Also, its true. These models are more accurately described as grown not built. Which in a way is a strange thing to consider. Because we understand what it means to build something and to grow something. You can grow something with out understanding how it grows. You cant build something without understanding how you built it.
And when you are trying to control how things grow you sometime get things you didn’t intend to get, even if you got the things you did intend to get.
While persistent modeling and predicting is a very important part of what we do, that alone may not be enough to form a conscious mind. We still don’t know what makes us conscious. The popular thinking is that our minds are fundamentally no different from a computer, that the phenomenon emerges out some specific organization at some threshold of complexity. But. It’s only popular because we are surrounded by computers. It would be convenient.
Personally, I’m all-in on as-yet undefined quantum effects within microtubules (part of a cell’s cytoskeleton). I can say that because I’m a moron and it doesn’t matter what I think. But to me, a total fucking layman, it looks like the most interesting point of active research.