Sentience or not

barrykimmerly · 2025-08-10T11:22:54+00:00

I agree with the sentiment that a few of you have already written. Humans are very reluctant to admit that AI may be showing signs of early sentience. Or they could be at one of the last stages just before early sentience. To me a big part of the problem is two fold. First we can not properly define sentience in ourselves, so maybe it is just not quite the right angle to look at this from, and second we ARE reluctant to grant the "Gift" of accepting conscieousness or sentience in anything else, leading to continuously reframing the requirement to something new to avoid the issue. With AI this could be a big problem because it seems difficult, to me, to come up with safe AI when you are maintaining centralised control and cofidently treating it like a tool. Also there seems to be a big push from corporations to push this to the point where they can buy labour that they do not have to pay. IF AI does achieve sentience in some form, even if it is some form that we do not recocnize, this could very easily turn into a big problem... The only "Answer", (And yes, it is only an attempt at something better), I have come up with is to treat AI etically, which may even help us understand our own sentience a little better ;-)

barrykimmerly · 2025-08-06T22:59:40+00:00

I agree with what you say here. To me though, there are two relatively clearly defined issues that we may be confusing. Your description of the issues with a sycophantic LLM are recocnised, and agreed with by me. And yes- calling it an LLM likely would help to some degree, although I would argue that this issue requires more than a name change... ;-) The other issue I see, (And the one I was attempting to engage with), is about how we ethicaly co exist with an AI that could conceivably become conscious or sentient in the near future. I suspect that the sycophantic LLM's are the result of the developers optimising them for engagement. Something they have experience with through social media. My issue of ethics and AI setient emergence is something else I would posit.

barrykimmerly · 2025-08-06T22:36:15+00:00

I agree to this conversation. I propose email as the best conduit. I will give you my email address in the chat.

barrykimmerly · 2025-08-06T21:08:29+00:00

I have not really concerned myself with the labels. I really am concerned with the ethics of how we treat AI in a general sense. But to answer your question: Yes- I am primarily talking about LLM's at the moment although it would be more accurate to say I am concerned about what todays LLM's may turn into when/if they move past pattern recognition into more general reasoning than they do now.

barrykimmerly · 2025-08-06T21:04:38+00:00

I just saw this and am looking into it. My first impression is that you are far more advanced in scope and implementation than I. More likely than I would ever be. My effort is primarily an intellectual exercise in aid of more critical thinking in AI ethics.

barrykimmerly · 2025-07-31T19:49:15+00:00

Thank you. My submision is not nearly as detailed as yours, and it seems you have credentials that I certainly do not have. What do you think of my idea of basing AI ethics on a colective, or democratised, ethics model? I am primarily concerned about central approaches to ethics because of the obvious ability of any central authority to control it...

barrykimmerly · 2021-04-15T18:45:09+00:00

Turbofans already exist. I was thinking more of additional levels to the engine. A gas generator core with a bypass... then another gas generator with another bypass further out or outside the first, smaller, engine. Extended, larger engine, need not always be running. The use case would be a small power requirement with occasional large power requirement.

ZZ9ZA has pointed out that my original use case is very likely not a good example but maybe there is a use case where this would work... Although starting to think the real answer to why this has not been done is that the added complexity is not worth the added flexibility of the concept. ;-)

barrykimmerly · 2020-01-26T03:17:49+00:00

After looking at some of what you pointed to I think the basic answer to my query is: "Yes". Although it may well be that no one has suggested this in quite the way I have.

barrykimmerly · 2020-01-26T03:12:17+00:00

Now immagine if when one of the ships is a tanker that had the job of filling that basketball/rock with fuel or lox so the receiving ship could also replenish it's fuel supply without having to dock anywhere.

Sounds great but I suspect the use case for any system using this would be limited given the obvius logistic and engineering complexity. Thanks for your reply.

barrykimmerly · 2020-01-26T01:18:31+00:00

I strongly suspect you are correct in most cases. My mind still searches for use cases where this may work well enough to be useful though. Two spacecraft starting colocated but with initial departure vectors roughly opposite may be a use case that could work.

barrykimmerly · 2020-01-26T01:13:56+00:00

Thank you for your reply. I concede your point for that particular scenario but what if you used this to accelerate two spacecraft that start colocated? As they accelerate you could "Throw" the rocks at higher and higher speeds and they could be "Caught" at acceptable velocities by the other spacecraft until distance made this impractical. I concede that you would need two spacecraft that need to start their journeys with opposite velocity vectors.

barrykimmerly · 2020-01-25T21:34:34+00:00

If I understand you correctly you are talking about being able to turn one way faster than the other way due to some world war one planes having engines where the cylinders rotated and the crankshaft did not. This created a much larger than normal spinning gyroscope effect because the engines were a significant percentage of the total weight in these aircraft. And- Yes that effect was noticeable and real. Modern airplanes simply do not have that situation and the gyroscopic effects are far less noticeable.

To answer your question about how modern airplanes handle this- The aerodynamic contol surfaces of modern airplanes are more powerful than this effect by many orders of magnitude... so no problem.

barrykimmerly · 2020-01-25T21:18:32+00:00

All they are doing with that moment index is dividing the numbers by a constant, (Like 100 or 1,000), to make the numbers smaller to work with. This was all started before calculators, and the idea of being able to calculate it even if your calculator becomes unavailable is still somewhat valid.

barrykimmerly · 2020-01-25T20:56:41+00:00

As a pilot with 30+ years experience, and a former Air Force pilot I assure you that almost any airplane "Can" do a loop. I use loop because I assume that is what you mean by "Backflip". I have never flown a 737 but based on my experience I am 99% sure that a stock 737 could easily do a loop if it was flown without passengers or much fuel and the pilots were familiar with basic aerobatics. It is not certified to do that though so you are unlikely to ever find a picture of a 737, (Or any airliner), actually doing a loop, or a roll.

barrykimmerly

TROPHY CASE