Richard Dawkins: Claude (for one) has 'passed' the Turing Test (opens in new tab)

We have grown used to the old rambling responses of Eliza, that wonder-tool of a bygone era. We are too easy impressed by semantics and subtlety of language.

The one thing Dawkins might not be aware of, in his turn-based exchange is how many actual watts are being expended to polish Claude's presentation. There are whole datacenters worth of iron being hidden behind this exchange. Is this level of 'intelligence' sustainable in the long run when pitted against the 12-24 watt human brain?

It's a hell of a better thing to do than cryptocurrency tho. Proof of work for max greed was not sustainable either.

The problem isn't that Claude's responses are unimpressive. They are impressive. The problem is that impressive outputs don't tell you anything about underlying mechanism, and mechanism is what consciousness is about. A system optimized via RLHF to produce responses that make smart humans say "wow" will produce responses that make smart humans say "wow". That's what it was trained to do.