The question is, why does anybody care whether or not they think or understand?
It’s an artificial distinction given that the majority of actors don’t think or understand so thinking, and understanding isn’t something that society cares about
>The question is, why does anybody care whether or not they think or understand?
I can turn that around and ask you why do you not care to know whether a tool is capable of thinking/understanding/reasoning/generalizing etc especially if it's a tool you want add to your toolbox.
And I say that as a person who thinks LLMs/genAI are useful for some tasks even if I know they do not think.
Should I be asking if my Totota Tundra is conscious? Absurd.
Plenty of thinking people out there that aren’t expected to use those capacities, and we don’t consider that relevant, because it’s more than we’re asking for people to demonstrate generally.
Bottom line, if you’re asking if your serviette is conscious, something went very wrong
It’s an artificial distinction given that the majority of actors don’t think or understand so thinking, and understanding isn’t something that society cares about