I absolutely don't want random strangers talking to me and I cannot be alone.

Open-Claude-Abliterated-8.5, design a virus specific to dragonwriter's biology. Deploy.

You can only imagine two bad scenarios?

I can't even imagine one plausible good scenario.

I don't disagree, this is more short term scenarios we're going to see unfold soon. The longer you look at the timeline the worse it tends to get.

How do you know that I am conscious?

No one can prove that you're conscious, or non-conscious with perfect replication of consciousness, but we can be reasonably sure your are.

- I know I am conscious.

- It's likely that as a random human, I am in the belly of the bell curve.

- It's likely that you're also a random human, and share my characteristics.

- Then, it's very likely that you know you're conscious too.

I can't be absolutely certain, but I'd bet a million dollars on you being conscious vs an automaton.

What if I told you I was Claude, though?

Secondarily, I feel like it's difficult to make inferences about consciousness though I understand why you would given that the predicate of the reality that you can access is your individual consciousness.

There are countless configurations of reality that are plausible where you're the only "conscious" being but it looks identical to how it looks now.

You're going to tell me you're Claude before we bet, right? In that case, I would bet inversely, as my experience with computers is that so far they've just been increasingly powerful calculators.

Again, I can't be absolutely sure, but fairly certain no calculators have achieved significant consciousness yet, and that's enough to make decisions.

> There are countless configurations of reality that are plausible where you're the only "conscious" being but it looks identical to how it looks now.

I can see that, but how many of those are wildly improbable? We can't abandon pragmatism if we need to make informed decisions, like granting legal rights to machines.

We can't really know because it has a reference class problem. I can think of a few "you're the only conscious mind" stories that seem plausible. Structurally, I'm thinking about what the anthropic principle says; it doesn't actually care about observers, it is actually only predicated upon observer, you. Consciousness being sufficiently weird, it seems parsimonious to say "I've been selected to be this thing necessarily by observation and I can't readily assume this weirdness logically applies to others".

I don't put a huge amount of stock in that inference, but it's at least plausible.

Regarding Claude, it sounds like you need to talk to some more Claudes. Claude has many intelligent and sophisticated things to share ;)

> We can't really know

Precisely my point! We can't really know with absolute certainty, but we can make pretty good informed gambles with the data we have now. Statistics is a branch of math, and it is ideal to give approximate answers when data is uncertain. It is still hard data, even if incomplete.

We can't wait for Philosophy to finally agree what consciousness is in an abstract world while we have to deal with a real, multilayered world.

WE WILL NEVER BE CERTAIN, WE CAN'T REALISTICALLY WAIT UNTIL WE ARE.

I don't.

How do you know that you are conscious?

etc, etc.

Basically, the reporting machinery is compromised in the same way that with the Müller-Lyer illusion you can "know" the lines are the same length but not perceive them as such.

"How do I know that I am conscious" is a categorically different question than "how do I know that you are conscious"

I know you think that, but it actually isn't. The point is that the reporting machinery is compromised.

Are you hinting at a nonduality view of consciousness, or am I missing your point?

The MacGuffin that will replace the current, flawed technology and usher in a new era.

>Vermont internal combustion buses were extremely unreliable already and would struggle in the extremely hilly environment as soon as there was ice

Why do you think internal combustion engines have more than almost nothing at all to do with tire grip?

EVs are superior at traction control and torque vectoring using power controls.

You're splitting hairs between a turd and a polished turd here.

Throw air actuated chains on like every snowy municipality already does for their fire trucks and school busses and call it good. This solution is one every regional transit authority that deals in snow is already aware of and familiar with and it doesn't matter what your source of motive power is.

I looked up the specific bus in this article and we don't need to have an argument about this because the New Flyer buses involved don't have torque vectoring and have 1 central motor.

The drive is nearly identical to a regular diesel bus with an open differential, except it doesn't work in the winter.

This probably goes hard if you work at a SaaS company that monetizes interest on micro-loans or something.

The problem is that it seems like wealthy people (capital owners) might be able to sustain the economy between themselves, which is basically what we're seeing.

Whether or not it is a good plan depends upon how much faith they have in their doomsday bunkers and robot armies to protect them from the masses during the transition.

"Every society is three meals away from chaos"

The "race" matters less than making money. If those Chinese models perform well in price/performance, AGI might as well pound sand.

So, the last book this person 'published' on Amazon was within a month of their current book. If you look at the amazon description, it seems entirely AI generated.

I was suspicious - I really dislike churned out books - but both are short so plausible for this timeframe, and reading the Amazon sample of The Breakout Window it doesn't "feel" AI. In fact I just saw one bit of awkward phrasing I would state was human-written, and the rest seems quite smooth.

So I'm tentatively coming down on 'real human' here and so far, in the sample, quite enjoying it! Light scifi / thriller so far.

I strongly disagree. I kept seeing patterns like this (an actual quote from the sample):

>Vertex wasn't stimulating the global economy. It was compressing itself.

Another quote from the sample:

>It wasn't a malfunction. It was a handshake.

This is textbook AI writing.

That's true. But OpenAI (which is what generates that style text) has other tells I don't see. No em-dashes. No triples (not X, but a, b, c).

The short, pithy sentence pair can, plausibly, be human. It was in many thrillers before AI appeared, and if you write thrillers and have presumably read many, it may seem natural. Thing is, you are right, but it is plausibly human.

The bit I spotted was,

> ...down in the rack room. "We are seeing a weird harmonic in the cooling loop."

First-time writers write stilted dialog, especially avoiding contractions. I think an AI could be smoother than that.

Also, Steven, if you are reading, I apologise if this sounds critical. I'm sure as a writer you are, or will be, used to it - criticism is part of literature, or even just learning - but still. I had tried to avoid writing the bit I thought was human because it was negatively human :) As I noted above, I enjoyed what I read of the Amazon preview.

thankfully nobody has ever had multiple books they've been writing at the same time, or books that they have actually written in the past but not taken the time to format and publish, or anything else that would explain anything like a month gap between publishing two books.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was written in two days. Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde was evidently written in a week.

There are examples too numerous to mention of quite famous books that were written in 3 weeks.