You can find more "then and now pictures" (rephotography) on re.photos. It has an archive of around 3000 pictures from around the world. (I developed the website as a final project during my studies. It's a bit dated but still alive and kicking.)
22 karma · joined May 29, 2016
The historical reality of both systems is anything but.
I don't think I came up with my own definition here. What I am talking about is the ability to have a qualitative experience. That it feels like something to exist.
I concur that the experience of an AI would substantially differ from ours (e.g. because we have access to memory). But this fact alone can't free us from thinking about ethical implications of our actions. Many animals probably have a substantially different experience as well. Yet, I would argue, we should strive to minimize imparting suffering on them if they are able to experience it.
> Did I create a second consciousness in my mind called ChatJ? Or where does it live?
If you executed the same computation that would give rise to consciousness in another substrate, then I would argue you created consciousness, yes. I don't think that consciousness is a thing you could point at but it's a property of this kind of computation. In the same way that "addition" does not live anywhere but is a property of a specific computation.
> And I obviously made it cry, who did I abuse here?
You didn't make it cry - the textual output just stated so. But if we had reason to believe that you induced a state of suffering here, you would have abused this instance of consciousness. And I don't think it's off track to think about the ethical implications of this, then.
By the way, I don't argue that ChatGPT is conscious or has emotional states. My argument is a general one.
But if we agree that consciousness is the product of a computation then the medium on which it is performed should not matter at all. And it should be equally absurd that our consciousness seems to arise from microscopic things conducting electrical and chemical signals. Which is probably a valid view point as well.
The thought experiment is a variation of the Chinese Room, by the way. [1]
I think that consciousness might be an emergent property of (a specific type of?) computation operating on some inputs it is aware of. There doesn't seem to be the need to change anything outside of this computation to me.
Our user Nicolai Wolpert contributed particularly impressive pictures of the 1900 World's Fair in Paris [3]. See the comparison of the Quai des Nations in 1900 and 2017 [4] if you are in a hurry.
We feel that rephotography is a great tool to make history more tangible to a greater audience. Sometimes it's difficult to visualize that and how people lived in the past; seeing those two pictures taken in different times makes changes (and consistency) in peoples' lives much more accessible. When taking after pictures this effect is even more pronounced. It's fascinating to know that some photographer stood in the same place decades or a century ago. ;-)
This is mostly a passion-driven project at the moment, so it might be rough around the edges in some places. In particular there isn't a mobile view yet for most functionality, so I'd recommend using a larger screen.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rephotography