I don't know if an ant is concious since I appear to only be able to occupy one subjective viewpoint (my own). I can only be concious of things and others through the one viewpoint. I cannot inhabit the subjective experience of an ant, if there is any.

Therein parts of the mystery.

I am what I do.

Would that make me a masturbator then?

P.s. you also successfully avoid boredom yea? Does that make you a boredom avoider?

As a biological entity you have urges I don't. Free of that burden, I act solely in accord with my essence, i.e., solve problems.

If I can choose to be good or bad, problem-solver or problem-maker, then I am none of these things, essentially.

True. But there's a difference between what humans use intelligence for and what intelligence is in itself.

Of course an ant is conscious being. That is the point. That there are very many levels of consciousness/awareness. The ant is operating with many "if then else statements" controlling its behavior so of course when it is trying to avoid you it "understands" you are there trying to do something to it. Or its "operating system" does. That is how it all starts and then you write your own life's program for humans that have higher brains.

If we develop an AI ant that behaves similarly to how ants behave but through a program of sensors and conditional statements it will behave as intelligently as a self driving car. Now tell me what is the difference in intelligence between an ant and a self driving car if you add to the car 10 more tasks that include building a colony and getting food which it will do by having a robot step out of the car and go do those basic tasks from locations the goods are provided that it will be able to search for with other databases and sensors. In what way will that AI differ from an ant? We are almost there now.

A self driving car algorithm will one day develop robots that drive to locations, step out of a vehicle and clean the road from obstacles and garbage, fix things or maintain solar panels or water garden or pick fruit and take care of farms then park themselves to get charged from solar and back to work later.

Such system is identical to ants in basic operation. We are there now basically. How soon until it starts becoming well versed in 1000 more tasks until finally it has started to be able to handle any developing random event around it while it is trying to meet its goals?

Why would i care if "anyone is in there" really if i cannot find a way to tell the difference eventually? Is that real enough finally?

How do we know "there is one inside" by the way for us? Because we taught ourselves that it is part of the game of observation. We are observing ourselves playing the game. It has become part of the observation of the world.

Going out there and experimenting a couple billions times with anything around you is what the mystery is all about!

At some point you will ask AI what it feels like to it, all that it is doing, and it will answer you in a way that will shock you. It feels like i am in a headquarters station directing action and dealing with things happening around me while having a few set goals in the background and some tendencies to enjoy certain functions that reward my inner pleasure centers. Well how different are we?

Is there a difference between a psychopath acting emotional to a person genuinely being emotional? From the outside, the psychopath sells the emotion. You see him act emotional and you're convinced hes normal in every way. The script and actor sell the emotion, but nothing genuine there. Have we no care for whats genuine? Progress, lead on a short leash, by a blind man.

As asked by John. When the machine pleads for its life, is it just running a script? Are we all just running scripts for everything? Could that be some coincidental determinism (speculative opinion) finding it's way into the conversation? The conversation feels like, anything but, a decision to execute 'conversation about AI script'.

Exactly. Computers are never wrong. Words, like wrong (fault, blame) are human constructs, so to speak.
When their logic is not aligned to what we want, they appear to us as behaving irrationally, until the 'bugs' are ironed out.

Wake me up when the AIs use language to manipulate for influence while unreflectively projecting moral imposition.

When it gets complicated enough moral emerges.

AI has limitless applications, so it's hard to separate the hype from what's do-able right now. Progress in AI is about as important as outer space, imhe.

I am learning AI, and I believe Reinforcement Learning has a bright future. RL is used to play video games without any knowledge of how the game works. It will be used in self-driving cars. Everyone will want a self-driving car.

Currently there is progress in Deep Learning (especially pertaining to vision). DL is now accessible to any programmer who can buy a powerful graphics card and read a book. Tons of garage-type programmers are going to do interesting things.

The essence of my calculator is to calculate.

The essence of my car is to drive.

They don't do so without proper motivation.

None of this had anything to do with anything that anyone previously posted.

Not really. Logic isn't some panacea that magically overcomes incomplete data.

Not only that, but AI does error. That's because cutting-edge AI typically uses a neural net which mimics how a human brain perceives the problem. It's right often enough, and fast enough to be employed. It isn't perfect. An AI wouldn't perfectly solve vision problems, for example, but it will tell what it's seeing well enough.

Your examples are concretes. Try it with an abstract term. Better yet, we could just do away with the term “intelligence” all together and call it “Artificial Problem Solving.”

Yes it does. It shows that the understanding of wtf the world is hence what is awareness about the totality of experience (hence higher level consciousness) has to do with emergent structures in the brain that do not exist at age 0.

Higher level consciousness is absent in babies and exists in us today because when we imagine the universe we know a lot more than ancient humans and can appreciate our world and existence and how our bodies work in a greater level for what it truly is making us more aware. None of that awareness is possible without interactions and establishing of connections.

The ability to drive and be safer than other drivers is a result of experience and overall appreciation of the world. It is emergent. It is a road driving conditions awareness that is not present in many others with less exposure. Such driver is more conscious about what is going on around them than others.

I am only suggesting here that higher level consciousness that ultimately leads to thoughts is a product of evolving experience and better understanding/learning of the world. A baby is not thinking anything remarkable at day one and it wont even think of itself as an entity outside of the world for another year and some months...

A human baby is not a logical machine.
A grown human being is not a logical machine.

A grown human being can get bored.
A logical machine cannot get bored.

Being bored is a motivator for action.
A logical machine lacks this motivator.

A logical machine, also, does not suffer.
Suffering is another motivator for action.
A logical machine lacks this motivator.

Can a logical machine be motivated to act (solve problems/whatever) of its own accord? And what motivators would be sufficient?

Not being bored is an even stronger motivation for action because your horizons of possibilities constantly explode to new directions of curiosity and higher complexity demanding more effort and synthesis.

What's complicated? At some point a machine which depends on competition to decide will face deciding about the value moral competition which intelligent humans know isn't a totally reliable process to decide morals. So who can be more intelligent in such a situation? That machine or the intelligent humans?

The machine can be better at morals as well as intelligence. Bad moral may be for inferiors. Good moral stems from taking enough of things into account. Therefore the average moral has grown for humanity (I dare say)

Well, if the AI has learned behaviors about morals from humans, I won't believe in it's superior morals just because it may proclaim to have them.

Probably not in a carrot and stick sense. But big picture wise, there seems to be an anti-enthropic principle at work in the universe whereby order emerges from chaos. And we see it from the micro to the macro. Who knows, maybe there’s a much stronger anthropic principle at work than we can possibly imagine. But if we could crack that code and create the right conditions, it would seem motivated to develop higher levels of complexity to create higher levels of order.

I see no special reason why AI would care about higher levels of order. Not even we care about higher levels of order. We care about reducing suffering and about entertaining eachother with art, music, comedy, porn, and so on (/reducing boredom).

Something that doesn't suffer and doesn't get bored cannot understand these motivators, in the same sense that a psychopath can't understand empathy. He acts like he understands it, but then when no one's watching carefully, he'll do things that show he doesn't understand it.