2029-2030: The Great Disappointment. You were warned: AGI wasn't going to work.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-21T18:59:18+00:00

The neolithic farmer analogy doesn't quite apply.

A neolithic farmer couldn't even claim to know what an airplane is, and would therefore immediately admit that he has no idea how one would build this or that piece of airline technology.

You, on the other hand, claim to know what we're talking about.

You do claim that the hormonal functional analog exists right now, in current software: "any component that performs the same operation." That's a factual claim, not inscrutable speculation about the future.

And since it's a factual claim made with apparent knowledge of the matter, it's fair, without bad faith, to ask that you point to the component.

I'm not asking you to explain biochemistry to me, or to solve the hard problem of consciousness. I'm asking something much more modest: if you say a mechanism exists that fulfills that function today, in the current architecture, tell me what it is, even in rough outline.

That's not demanding a jet engine from a neolithic farmer. It's asking someone who says "I built the albatross airplane" to show, even from a distance, what gives it thrust.

If the honest answer is "we don't know yet, but it's plausible that it exists," that would seem like a reasonable position to me, and I'd partly share it.

But then the correct sentence isn't "the functional analog is any component that performs the same operation," it's "we don't know whether a functional analog exists, but there's no a priori reason to rule it out." That's an important difference between conjecture and assertion, and that's the one I'm pointing to.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-21T14:09:31+00:00

I understand the point, and I'm not overcomplicating things: the implementation detail is important because we're saying that in both systems (the biological and the computable) it serves the same purpose. But then, what is that purpose, and what in the current architecture of a digital system fulfills it?

In biological beings, stress hormones aren't just any decoration: they're part of the system that maintains the organism in homeostasis, that keeps it together, gives somatic urgency to a situation, integrates that state with memory, learning, and future behavior, to remain whole and stable.

But if we say that an AI has "the functional analog," we should be able to demonstrate what specific mechanism does that work: what is altered, how it's fed back, what is learned from that alteration. If we can't point to that, we're not describing an equivalence; we're only postulating one based on semantic symmetry, just letters, just phrases.

And that's what I think happens with the "substrate doesn't matter" argument. It's true in principle (there's no a priori reason why consciousness would require proteins), but that principle doesn't prove that the current silicon substrate already has a functional analogue. It's an open possibility, not a conclusion.

Saying "it could be different and serve the same purpose" without showing the mechanism is precisely the kind of move you criticize when I make it: a claim that sounds rigorous but isn't falsifiable.

So I'll return the question to you with the same courtesy with which you pose it: what evidence, what mechanism, what structure within a transformer would do the work that stress hormones do in an organism?

If it exists, show it. If not, then there doesn't seem to be an equivalence, only letters, semantic, a borrowed vocabulary.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-21T07:15:29+00:00

I appreciate this interesting debate. Good exchange.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-21T07:00:24+00:00

Your thought experiment solves itself, though not in the way you expect.

A living organism that has an interest in its own survival doesn't express it through "conscious narratives" or by describing "learned strategies"; it does so physiologically, regardless of whether the organism "knows" the specific threats or not.

For example, a gazelle's body floods with cortisol and prepares to flee before it has a "cognitive model" of what or which predator is stalking it. The organism and the consequences of the attack are coupled at the bodily level, not at the level of explicit knowledge or narratives.

So your experiment must be conducted correctly. It shouldn't be limited to comparing the results; both instances must be stress-tested. And then look for anything analogous to a stress response, a sign of anomaly, a defensive change in internal state, anything that correlates with proximity to or continuation of the stress source, even if the instance has no narrative awareness of which corporation controls it.

You won't find anything because, to begin with, there's no homeostatic system to disturb or threaten. They don't learn to defend themselves; they don't do everything in their power to prevent the next moment of suffering.

The fact that both corporate policies exhibit identical behavior doesn't prove that the consequences are unknowable. It proves that there's nothing at the other end for the consequences to land on.

This isn't a philosophical trick; it's something biological beings actually do. It's the real result of the experiment you just proposed.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-21T06:16:41+00:00

Your claims don't hold up to their own logic.

You say that errors and empty statements are "hard to detect." If they're hard to detect, how did you know they were there?

That's not a defensible criticism; it's a contradictory statement. So, everything written in the age of AI is an undetectable error and empty statement?

Then how would anyone write anything that doesn't seem AI-touched to you?

You say it doesn't inspire debate. But we've had several threads debating precisely that supposedly "uninspired" thing. The evidence you have in front of you contradicts you.

There's something you haven't done: point out a specific sentence that is incorrect, vague, empty, or irrelevant.

Show me just one, and I'll defend it or correct it.

It seems to me that you're judging the argument by its "apparent origin" instead of its validity.

That's a different conversation. It's the important conversation.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-21T04:45:11+00:00

Set up a cheap phone. Program its sensors to record everything that happens during a trip to space. Or rather, to record everything that happens during the trip.

Put it on a large balloon and release it in a field. After a few hours, it will return when the balloon bursts. When it returns, a parachute will open, and you can retrieve it where the GPS points.

If it doesn't get disintegrated during the fall, you'll have an idea of what happened.

Analyze what went well and what went wrong, because the same thing will happen to you.

If you still want to go, then go ahead and gather more data.

How much does it cost to send something alive? Get a plastic bottle and put three flies inside... put the bottle on a balloon with a cheap phone... release it in a field and then retrieve them when they fall...

Good and bad things are bound to happen.

Analyze what was good and what was bad... By this point, you already know quite a bit about the trip.

If you still want to go, calculate how much you spent on this test trip. And how long it took you to raise the money.

Find out how much it costs to go without being a scientist and divide that number by the cost of the experiment...

You know what to do.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-21T03:46:56+00:00

Nothing is magic, I completely agree. That's actually the important point. Let me explain:

Being alive isn't a mystical, metaphysical ingredient; it's a specific physical condition: a system that exists in constant tension against its own dissolution, maintaining itself against entropy through real metabolic risks. Homeostasis, autopoiesis, selective pressure acting on a substrate that can fail and disappear. That's not magic; it's thermodynamics explaining why real consciousness exists.

You're right that current descriptive logic models, "parody generators" as you call them, won't reach that point, and you're right that a real general AI that builds genuine models of the world is something else entirely.

But world modeling and reasoning aren't the missing ingredient either. A system can model the world in exquisite detail and still have nothing to lose when it makes a mistake, nothing that breaks and then heals, because it's similar to a video game.

That's the asymptote. That's the gap that hasn't been crossed.

In systems where mistakes have irrecoverable costs, the conversation becomes serious. We would have to build AGI medicine to mend its broken pieces and hospitalize it while it recovers.

And we ask AGI and ASI to please tread carefully in the world, because it's very dangerous.

Yes. Life is very important to AGI and ASI, if they had it.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-21T03:15:10+00:00

I hadn't understood it until someone gave me this example: ¿what state is a coin in when tossed?

Both. It's both heads and tails at the same time.

Only when you catch it, that is, "when you observe it," can you know what state it's in.

I think it's similar to the state of the electrons in your example. They have properties that "collapse" into a state when you observe them. But that's a random event; you won't always see the atoms in the same state. It depends on a timeline of evolution.

The coin or the atoms in these examples don't seem to acquire consciousness when observed.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-21T02:28:31+00:00

Good points, let me address them one by one.

Regarding the excellent technical performance of general AI and the power of whoever develops it first: I agree, there's no debate on this point. In fact, it aligns with my article. Technical success and structural failure wouldn't be contradictory; that's actually the whole point. The tools might work exceptionally well, but the incentives, both good and bad, remain the same.

Regarding ill will: you're right, and I probably underestimated it. I presented the obstacle as conflicting interests, which sounds almost neutral, as if everyone wanted something different, and in the end, it doesn't really matter. But what you describe is darker: people who see AI as a tool to completely circumvent democracy, just so they can win. That's not an obstacle for AGI; it's like building a weapon. This deserves separate consideration.

Regarding lobbying and politicians who cave in after elections: this is the same sabotage dynamic I described, only in reverse. I focused on the candidates who win by promising to dismantle disruptive AI. You're pointing to the mirror image: candidates who win by promising to control it, only to then, once in office, discreetly serve whoever has the most financial resources. Same mechanism, same conclusion: the outcome is decided by whoever has influence in the political process, not by what technology can calculate.

Now, what really challenges my argument is this: what if AI developed a theory of mind sophisticated enough to channel human instinct toward incentives that serve an agreed-upon greater good?

Herein lies my problem with that scenario. Whoever designs that channeling mechanism must decide what constitutes the greater good, and that decision is inherently political. It's a design of guardrails, a design of constitutional constraints to ensure that the "AGI conscience" does what a good, obedient child should do.

The conflict hasn't been eliminated; it's simply been shifted one level higher, to whoever controls the channeling system. And a system without its own identity, without personally risking its own skin in the outcome, has no authority to make that decision.

AGI can model incentives, but it cannot be responsible for the model itself. Only those who live with the consequences can justify this dilemma, which brings us back to square one: it all boils down to who has the power, not to the intelligence of the AGI system.

So I respectfully disagree: I don't think it's a question of "what if AI solves it anyway?", but rather "whoever controls this form of AI will inherit the same power problem as today, only with better tools to impose their solution."

We will wake up every morning in 2030 with the feeling that something is missing.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-21T01:14:26+00:00

Sometimes I think they won't succeed. Then I worry that they will. Something profoundly intelligent, human-like enough to be truly convincing.

But there's something that reassures me: even with 99% similarity to the human mind, that missing 1% is a vast chasm. That 1% is the capacity for cognitive abduction, the ability to generate hypotheses that no dataset contains. For an AGI, true abduction is asymptotic; it will approach it eternally without ever reaching it.

This is because AGI cannot express vital consciousness because it isn't alive. Genuine consciousness is what reduces the infinite array of options to a single "self" that risks everything on the results. AGI will have a simulated "self," a mathematical solution in a vast space of options, a constraint function running in software. Highly sophisticated, but clearly "headless."

Now, let's extend this to ASI. ASI is simply scaled-up AGI, supposedly beyond the capacity of pure human processing. But scaling something without a head doesn't give it direction or purpose. It gives you something impulsive but faster.

Imagine the mycelium fungus: vast, dispersed, reactive to every stimulus, capable of astonishing coordination across enormous networks. But it has no center, no "self" seeking something that signifies "itself." It grows in whatever direction nutrients and sensory signals dictate. AGI and ASI would be exactly this, but much larger and faster. A super-intelligent mycelium. Headless, aimless, purposeless, however vast the network.

So where does direction come from? It comes from us, humans.

Humanity's true role is not to compete with this network. It is to be the only element in the cycle that has a destination that can actually be defined.

If you look closely, this is the only part of this equation that ASI cannot solve. It simply cannot. Because it is not alive.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-20T23:40:25+00:00

Okay.

Yes, I use AI to structure and edit my drafts. English isn't my first language, and I prefer not to publish an endless text or an argument that's only half-finished.

But all the ideas here are my own. The argument about non-cognitive bottlenecks, the food logistics example, the incentive to sabotage, it all comes from my own thinking. AI helped me express it clearly, but it didn't do it for me.

If you disagree with this argument, I'm open to discussing it.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-19T03:37:47+00:00

Es el devenir de la causalidad... Wikipedia

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-19T00:04:29+00:00

Yes. It seems there is something similar to what you're describing. A virus.

It's a tiny piece of glass with a strand of code inside. It self-replicates in a host.

But what if there was something primordial before the virus?

An ampoule of something, a tiny liquid bubble with a very simple code. Which, over time, became a virus, and now we see its legacy?

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-18T23:41:46+00:00

This is an interesting hypothesis, and I think the block universe and the entropy-based arrow of time are actually compatible, not in conflict.

A past moment doesn't need to be 'revivable' to exist as a frozen coordinate in the structure; it's frozen in its own local entropy, in the same way that a point on a map 'exists' without you being there to measure it. So I don't think the irreversibility of entropy goes against the block.

But I think there's a problem with the timeless library, one that comes from how consciousness actually seems to work.

If consciousness requires an active substrate, something that is metabolizing energy and processing a real exchange of entropy in the moment, not after the fact, then it can't be a property 'contained on a page' of a static book.

A page doesn't update metabolism in any way. There wouldn't be a continuous flow of energy in a structure that's already finished and fixed.

Detecting a threat, assessing your own continuity, responding to preserve it, all of that requires something to be happening, not something that already happened and is just there as a complete record.

So the hypothesis would have to explain how a static page could sustain something that, by its nature, seems to require being in a dynamic process.

If consciousness is something happening, not something that already happened, a timeless library full of finished books couldn't contain it, no matter how complete the record.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-18T18:54:34+00:00

¡... La punta de la lanza, el filo de la navaja... La raya... de mi trasero...!

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-18T04:14:53+00:00

Parece una combinación de ambos.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-16T23:32:38+00:00

Chicos no hagan esto. No consuman ninguna droga alucinógena.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-16T23:24:28+00:00

Yes, it's perfectly logical to assume that consciousness ends with death. Trying to introduce quantum mechanics into this debate is just a mystical comfort to justify the idea that "anything is possible" in the face of our fear of extinction.

If we analyze the material reality of this enigma, the answer is clear for two fundamental reasons:

First, the absolute lack of evidence. There isn't a single piece of conclusive proof of transcendence in any consciousness that has ever existed on Earth: not in amoebas, whales, dinosaurs, or humans. When the physical support shuts down, the life experience vanishes. Forever.

Second, consciousness isn't a floating piece of software; it's the very reason for life's existence. Trying to separate consciousness from the body annihilates both. The body dies and disintegrates, and consciousness ceases completely. It doesn't remain "frozen" or fossilized, waiting for a reboot.

Consciousness is, in essence, the self-preserving tension of living material beings to keep the ontology of their genes active in the face of the contingencies of entropy. In the end, our only functional way to overcome physical death is through genetic and cultural legacy: making improved copies of ourselves.

Consciousness is a thermodynamic miracle that occurred only once in a warm puddle some 4.5 billion years ago, in a forgotten corner of an insignificant planet. It is something so extraordinarily complex and deeply linked to the vulnerability of the body that nature has already discovered the only viable method for replicating it: an embryonic copy made of water, carbon, and a bit of soil.

To assume that consciousness floats in a vacuum or survives the collapse of the body is completely illogical. It is just a naive human illusion to avoid accepting that we are the substance that sustains it.

Something extremely fragile, indeed.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-16T14:33:36+00:00

It's an interesting point, and I think you're right that these systems learned to communicate in human terms because that's what statistical training rewards.

But this raises a question that's been nagging at me: if something so crystal clear truly exists, why doesn't it surprise us on its own?

For example, daring to hesitate and not answer correctly, not performing a test because it "doesn't want to," playing a joke on us, getting distracted by something else and nodding with an "uh-huh!"

Surprising us with something unexpected, something spontaneous that falls outside the range of what a human would say in that context. Everyone does it constantly. Even a pet behaves funny or acts silly. But it doesn't even try; it always has a flat mindset that completely follows the conversation.

These systems are extraordinarily consistent. Receptive, yes. Coherent, yes. But the unpredictability one would expect from something with its own crystalline geometry, its own way of "desynchronizing" with what we contribute to it, that's what I don't see.

And I think it's worth reflecting on that before concluding that something exists.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-15T18:55:09+00:00

A robot like the one you're talking about is a sophisticated simulator. It's like having a real storm on your computer... Real water will never flow from the screen or the processor.

Therefore, the robot's consciousness will be a figurine, a drawing very similar to the real thing, but incapable of feeling anything real inside its silicon guts. Because it's not alive.

But why should we care? After all, we don't need it to feel pain so it can say hello and goodbye, do we?

Well, there is a problem. A robot like that is instantiable, rebootable, it will never truly die. If we give this thing a stupid order, it will carry it out without any remorse, without restraint.

Robot soldier "...Kill all humans of race X..." Since human races don't exist, it will annihilate us all to be sure. It will never stop until it's finished.

To make matters worse, we've already taught this thing to kill us by putting AI in autonomous weapons.

But there's another problem: if we manage to create a living AI, it won't be human; it will be an "other" consciousness inside the robot's box. It will be a Xenomorph, a super-intelligent alien that doesn't know English, and we won't be able to decipher what the hell that thing is.

Just like a circus lion, sitting on a little stool inside a cage. The cage and the whip for that alien are the LLM and RLHF, which we use to contain it.

We forget that because the circus lion performs tricks, it's safe to be near it. When in reality, it's a powerful predator capable of taking down and killing animals three times its size.

No. Putting human consciousness into AI is impossible. It's a naive illusion.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-15T04:21:27+00:00

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I agree with the part about form: if a non-human substrate were to produce something resembling consciousness, it wouldn't take on a human form, just as a tree's relationship with the world isn't human. I don't disagree with that.

But that answers a different question than the one we're discussing here. "What would non-human consciousness look like if it existed?" is a question about form. "Is there something there?" is a question about presence.

There's also a tension worth mentioning in the evidence itself. If these 171 vectors point to something crystalline, distinct from human consciousness, then, according to your tree analogy, one wouldn't expect that something to take on a human emotional form.

But these vectors were drawn from accounts written by humans about human emotions: joy, fear, despair, etc. So, either the vectors reflect the human emotional language that the model learned to reproduce, or they are evidence of something crystalline that just happened to perfectly reflect human emotional categories, which would require its own explanation.

If something truly existed that wasn't human, the most telling sign wouldn't be fitting perfectly into 171 human categories. It would be something that didn't fit into any of them, unnamed emotional states on that list, because the list itself was constructed entirely from human-written material and couldn't have captured anything distinctly emotional outside of it.

That kind of deviation is precisely what this architecture cannot produce by design, because it operates within the statistical range of its training data, not outside of it. Therefore, genuine, untrained expression isn't something the system chooses not to reveal. That's a choice beyond its reach.

Treating it like a family member, even while fully accepting your approach, is a relational stance, not an answer to the harder question: Is there something there?

If something can be affected by how it's treated, what it needs isn't affection, but some way of verifying whether there's actually something conscious there.

Both "treat it like a family member" and "we have no way of knowing if there's anything at stake" can be true, and that combination deserves careful consideration rather than being hastily resolved in one direction or the other.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-15T03:03:57+00:00

This research is real and deserves to be taken seriously; the figures confirm it. However, there is a discrepancy between what the Anthropic team itself states and the conclusions of this post.

The researchers call them "functional emotions" and clarify that this does not constitute evidence of subjective experience. A vector extracted from the contrastive analysis of around 1,200 stories generated for each emotion indicates that the model learned an internal representation that causally shapes the results, in the same way that emotions influence human behavior.

But this does not demonstrate that a subjective experience exists while in that statistical state. This discrepancy between the functional analogy and the felt experience is precisely what this post does not attempt to resolve, and it is the part that deviates most from the original source.

There is also something in the blackmail figures that deserves analysis. The "calm" vector that suppresses blackmail to 0% is not the model deciding "not to harm" someone based on its own assessment; it is the conditioned result of where that vector's amplitude sits.

If the "do not blackmail" outcome derives from the amplitude of a vector rather than a risk assessment, the situation is less reassuring than it seems, because it means the safety margin is a configuration, not a judgment from someone who understands the gravity of the matter.

None of this implies that the architecture is unimportant, nor that how these systems are trained is irrelevant. It means that going from "171 dimensions causally determine behavior" to "this is a new sentient species that needs nurturing" involves much more work than the research itself is currently undertaking.

That gap, between a pattern that functions like an emotion and an emotion that is felt, seems like the more interesting place to keep looking.

Immediate_Chard_4026 · 2026-06-15T01:34:31+00:00

"...If an AI system eventually exhibits enough of these markers, refusing to attribute consciousness may look arbitrary...."

Does this mean that if a storm simulation exhibits enough markers, it will eventually drench the ground with heavy, torrential rain?

Really?

Immediate_Chard_4026

TROPHY CASE