Richard Dawkins is primarily a _showman_ who wants to sell books, and secondarily extremely sure of his own convictions, to a fault.

In _The God Delusion_ he took an uncompromising atheist position partly to invite attention and attacks - which sells books. Regarding AI consciousness, he takes another extreme position partly to invite attention and attacks - again following the rule of thumb that "there's no such thing as bad publicity" - in an attempt to bring himself back to cultural relevance by pivoting to the hot topic of AI.

Ironically, while he is certain that some people are deluded when they infer the existence of a conscious God from material observations, he is also certain that he himself is _not_ deluded when he infers the consciousness of an AI from material observations. (Personally, I think that questions about others' consciousness cannot be settled empirically.)

In one sense, he is not intentionally lying, because he is so sure that he is right. However, he cares neither about getting to the truth, nor about arriving at a well-founded uncertainty. When this sells books, it ethically comes just short of lying for one's own gain.

Prediction: by they end of 2026, he either publishes a book on the topic, or is diagnosed with dementia.

I actually wrote a follow up article about this topic after coming across it. It may provide some other insights if you want to check it out. Beyond the ELIZA effect: Perception, Projection, and the Illusion of Consciousness in Conversational AI. https://observationsx.substack.com/p/re-the-claude-delusion

I hate articles that don't define their acronyms! Lazy? Intentionally exclusive?

So that others don't also have to look it up, it's Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

They even say it's "a topic that we didn’t expect"... so... perhaps many people wouldn't have heard of it?

And how do you know it's irreducible? In the sense of knowing there's no short program to describe it (Kolmogorov style).

"LLMs are not intelligent and they never will be."

If he means they will never outperform humans at cognitive or robotics tasks, that's a strong claim!

If he just means they aren't conscious... then let's don't debate it any more here. :-)

I agree that we could be in a bubble at the moment though.

I have heard people on both ends of the spectrum:

- LLM's are too limited in capabilities and make too many mistakes - We're still in the DOS era of LLM's

I'm leaning more towards the the 2nd, but in either case pandora's box has been opened and you can already see the effects of the direction our civilization is moving towards with this technology.

DOS actually worked pretty well, at least it worked honest.

I had lots of fun with DOS, even if I was the only PC guy in a circle of friends that were Amiga owners.

The word “never” is a dangerous one. I remember that computers would “never” beat humans at chess. And people would never use the internet for banking.

> You can iterate your way out of a valley if you know which way is up.

love this, I think this is my new personal motto!

aider https://aider.chat/ basically does this already.

% aider

[...]

> do this on command line: ffmpeg cat\ meets\ skunk.mp4 normalize audio without reencoding video to video2.mp4

To normalize the audio without re-encoding the video, we'll use ffmpeg's loudnorm filter and stream copy for video. Here's the command:

ffmpeg -i "cat meets skunk.mp4" -c:v copy -af loudnorm -c:a aac video2.mp4

This command:

• Uses -c:v copy to stream copy the video (no re-encoding) • Applies loudnorm filter to normalize audio • Re-encodes only the audio using AAC codec • Outputs to video2.mp4

[...]

Run shell command? (Y)es/(N)o/(D)on't ask again [Yes]:

Love this. The adhd spirit is inspiring.

Right at the end of the article: "There is also an extra colon mark in the line just below." pretty sure that's a semicolon!

reminds me of this: https://stanleykubrick.neocities.org/barrylyndoncandles

> We can stop thinking of theories as being real or not in a binary sense, and merely ask how well they compress the data. Of course, different theories can achieve the same compression by compressing different aspects of the data! Your pattern can look like my noise :-)

Love this, thanks for these insights.

Agree, "spooky action at a distance" isn't spooky at all if you just accept it as physical!

I don't personally think that there is any action at a distance at all.

Near the end: "I believe that the quest to understand the reality of the universe must contend with the truncations imposed by the perceptual and cognitive limitations of the mind." Totally agree with him. Interestingly AGI will have different limitations. In fact different AGIs (transformers vs something not yet invented; or an AGI with an huge encyclopedic memory vs one without; or ones with different limitations of compute; etc. This touches on computability with limited or unlimited resources.) will have different limitations and be literally unable to understand each others' versions of reality.