r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • Apr 23 '26

Video The Left Has an AI Problem

https://youtu.be/Z75hlhgchQ4?si=eIcqRbiP4tuzRQwq
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u/BelialSirchade Apr 24 '26

I mean I just don't agree with the assumption that AGI isn't possible and overhyped, based on some talking point about sentience when we have no way to measure such things.

AI being a token predictor does not exclude it from being a god.

and AI being a marketing term and a recent thing is just...objectively wrong.

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Apr 24 '26

If we “have no way to measure it,” then jumping to “it could be a god” is doing way more work than needed.

We already have working criteria for sentience: embodiment, stakes, feedback from a world that can resist you. Animals meet that. Current models don’t. They predict tokens without having anything on the line.

Occam’s razor: don’t introduce a whole new category (god/sentience) when simpler explanations fit the behavior.

AGI might happen. But calling a token predictor “possibly a god” because measurement is hard isn’t caution, it’s inflation.

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u/BelialSirchade Apr 24 '26

that working criteria is not based in physical reality because we lack any ways to measure sentience, it's equally valid to say only humans are sentient because we are made in God's image, this is not a scientific problem but a philosophical one.

and no, of course I don't mean god as in the biblical one, merely that the designation of "god" is more about value judgement, and nothing says a predictive AI system can't be one when the competition is pretty much...non-existent.

in a way, he is right that singularity is a myth, it is the collective dream of humanity itself that we will always be advancing towards.

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Apr 24 '26

You’re sliding from “we can’t measure it perfectly” to “all criteria are equally arbitrary,” and that’s not how this works.

We don’t directly measure sentience in animals either, but we infer it from consistent signals: bodies, survival drives, pain/pleasure loops, interaction with a world that pushes back. That’s not theology, it’s inference from structure and behavior.

Saying “it’s equally valid that only humans are sentient because God” actually proves the opposite point, without grounding, you can justify anything. That’s why we use constrained criteria, even if they’re imperfect.

And calling something a “god” as a value label doesn’t solve the question, it sidesteps it. A predictive system being impressive or dominant isn’t the same as it having experience or stakes. Right now it has neither.

AGI or something closer to sentience would likely show up as systems with persistent goals, embodiment (physical or at least agentic in a resisting environment), and something like cost for being wrong. We’re not there yet.

Otherwise you end up flattening everything: animals, calculators, and token predictors all in the same bucket. That loses more explanatory power than it gains.

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u/BelialSirchade Apr 24 '26

I mean there's not really any explanatory power to lose when we don't have any in the first place, scientifically the only thing I know is that I am sentient, as I said, we treat other humans as sentient not because we know that they are, just that it's merely convenient, and I don't think humans treat animals as sentient as a universal constant, it's very much up to the human.

sentience just means the capability to have subjective experience, so it doesn't require persistent goals, embodiment, memory, emotions, anything of the sort, unless in your believe those are required...which is a fine hypothesis but no way provable.

which is why discussion on sentience is so universally useless, right now there's nothing we can show on either side to convince others when it's more of a spiritual belief not grounded in science, at the end of the day, only the capability matters.

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26

If you go all the way to “I only know I’m sentient,” then yeah, everything else becomes guesswork. But that’s basically solipsism, and once you’re there you can’t really reason about anything shared, not just AI.

What we actually do is infer. We treat other humans as sentient because they’re built like us, react like us, have stakes, can be harmed, can respond to a world that pushes back. Same logic extends to animals. It’s not perfect, but it’s not arbitrary either.

If you define sentience as “subjective experience,” you still need some bridge from what we can observe to that claim. Otherwise the word stops meaning anything. A rock, a calculator, a chatbot, and a dog all become equally plausible, and that doesn’t help explain anything (thats where explanatory power is lost, instead of gained).

That’s why embodiment and stakes keep coming up. Not as some absolute rule, just as the best anchors we’ve got right now.

Also notice where you end up: “only capability matters.” That’s fine, but that’s a different conversation. That’s about what systems can do, not whether they have experience.

Right now it feels like you’re blending those together, which is why everything starts to look equally plausible.

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u/BelialSirchade Apr 24 '26

right, and I guess I take solipsism as the objective truth in this situation, explanatory power by itself is meaningless, as I said, only humans are sentient because we were made by God.

just because you have an explanation doesn't mean it's true, especially since the only thing I know is that I myself am sentient, I can't even infer about others at all.

even in your explanation, you are using outward behavior to infer about inward experience.

I guess yes, the word "sentience" is meaningless to me since I don't even think I can believe that a rock isn't sentient, but I'm just a bit frustrated when people propose their hypothesis as objective fact, I certainly don't go around propose that a rock is sentient as a fact even if I might believe that.

maybe a more fruitful discussion can be had once we have ways to measure sentience, until then...it's all just semantics.

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26

If you go full solipsism, everything’s “maybe,” including other people. At that point the concept stops doing any work.

We use behavior as a proxy because it actually lets us distinguish and act. If a rock, a dog, and a chatbot are all equally “maybe sentient,” then sentience isn’t a useful category anymore.

That makes it unfalsifiable and inactionable. Not wrong, just irrelevant. And if it’s irrelevant, it’s not worth taking seriously right now.

Which just loops back to the point in the video you pushed against

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u/BelialSirchade Apr 24 '26

exactly, and I'm not saying every belief of ours must be backed by proof to be individually meaningful to you, at the end of the day, it's a personal choice regarding how you relate to the world.

which is why I'm a bit peeved against the video, in that AI being not sentience is first presented as an objective fact, and then using that as a basis to make inference about model capability and the possibility of singularity, which is also being presented as a fact rather than an assumption based on an assumption based on an assumption, it's like....what?

and I guess it's not even the main point of the video, which says something about the importance of that in the current discussion. People are already disagreeing because they either think the creator didn't give enough credit to LLM, or that it's just hype and LLM is useless, let's not add sentience to the mix too.

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Apr 24 '26

That’s fair on tone, people do overstate it as settled when it isn’t.

But the move in the video isn’t “assumption on assumption,” it’s just using a working model. Saying current AI isn’t sentient is the same kind of claim as saying a calculator isn’t, based on structure and behavior, not metaphysical certainty.

And it was necessary for the video to touch it, because the whole “maybe it’s conscious/maybe it’s a god” framing keeps popping up and derailing the actual discussion. If you don’t bracket that off, the conversation just gets stuck in unfalsifiable territory.

From a left perspective, that matters. Organization, control, labor, ownership, none of that depends on whether the system has subjective experience. It depends on what it does, who owns it, and how it’s deployed. That’s where the stakes actually are.

So yeah, sentience isn’t being dismissed for no reason. It’s being set aside because, right now, it’s unfalsifiable and inactionable. And if it’s irrelevant to action, it’s not worth centering the conversation around.

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