What. If I’d known this exists I’d’ve optimized my entire education and career to work there.
If there were any government department where capes should be part of the dress code, that is the one.
I don’t want to work there if I can’t wear my cape.
“Why yes, I am from the Office of Planetary Protection.”
*cape swishes winningly in the wind that springs up somehow even indoors*
Of the times that my bank has detected “unusual debit card activity,” it never has been.
The times that have been fraud were not detected as such.
The bank somehow flags as “fraud” things that I do and buy routinely, but some Russian hacker buying Bitcoin in Latvia from an IP address in Djibouti, that’s all good!
But me buying groceries at the grocery store I visit every damn week — well, obviously plunderous thievery.
These sorts of things make me have huge doubts about AI ever working as we expect.
Here is a variant of Wittgenstein’s diary thought experiment, using the inner light in place of private, inner sensation. Suppose I decide to try to discover whether and when I suffer from zombie episodes, episodes of phenomenal absence. So I keep a diary, and I write ‘L’ in the diary on those days when my inner light is switched on. Later, I tell myself, I will be able to look back through the diary and, seeing an ‘L’, be sure that I was phenomenally present on that day, that all was not dark inside. Well, how could I trust any previous occurrences of ‘L’ marked in my diary, even if (contra Wittgenstein) I were capable of unilaterally identifying when my private, inner light was on? After all, if I was phenomenally absent on that day—away with the zombies, so to speak—I would have written an ‘L’ in my diary even in my zombie state. So the ‘L’ can tell me nothing. It seems to have no use even in a private language.
–Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds by Murray Shanahan
