I was thinking about this the other way- new languages will always be designed by humans or human/ai collaboration but the task of a certain kind of viability will involve producing sufficient useful training material- and this when humans are intended to be able to also read the code strikes as being a new kind of gate, as such material will have to be automatically produced which may involve arriving at algorithmic definitions of fuzzy human syntactic concepts that refer to taste and readability. Super interesting design problem.
NYT needs to learn to not invest resources to verify "bullshit"- statements emitted by people who don't care about truth. The verification that something obviously false is false is a waste and doesn't penalize the bullshitter. Instead it wastes scarce truth-concerned resources, normalizes the value of bullshit, and validates the "flood the zone" media strategy. NYT has been failing at this asymmetric information war- that culminated in Trump's elections- for more than 20 years. It is time to do something different.
Yes... Though compared to most "pointless blue clicks pay the bills" stories, this one at least starts well.
Slightly bigger picture - just skim the headlines, and don't bother clicking on anything labeled (in effect) "Team Red is Bad". The NYT publishes a trickle of more meaningful articles about US politics. Or at least more informative articles - for those comfortably ensconced in a well-to-do Team Blue bubble, yet still willing to learn.
Actual big picture - welcome to late-stage capitalism. Big Media was bought up by Big Money, and is optimizing for profit. Team Blue is a herd of old cats, optimizing for a sort of lazy, self-righteous comfort. Team Red is an angry mob, but at least willing to follow leaders. (Who obviously care about no one but themselves...but are willing to think further ahead than their next quarterly bonus, sunny nap, or angry scream.) Everyone else is stuck in the resulting enshittified dystopia.
How? She literally builds the case that one hundred years later there is more work to do and that Wolfe’s prescience only went so far. It’s a salient continuation.
Fair to say there is no consensus on what experience and consciousness and so forth are but it is clear that Claude does not have those things. It is a word calculator. The word calculation is sophisticated and can simulate the verbal reporting of experiential conscious beings but it does not actually have those things itself.
Said another way it is very likely that non verbal symbolic language having creatures have experience and consciousness and Claude is definitely not one of those. Its "experience" is just the calculations across word sequences within a given set of conversations.
There is a long history of writing in this space and it is interesting that these models are not really anticipated by that literature. So the line between simulation via word calculation and reporting via verbal capacity is not well understood. And the human ability to discern simulation via only a word/conversation channel is limited.
So to answer your question, a Claude could easily be constructed to fool you into infusing it with continuity of self. But being fooled by a grift is not the same.
I'm not sure that "it is clear that Claude does not have those things".
I AM sure that it is hard to conclusively show that Claude has experience and consciousness. Even Claude isn't sure about that.
But while it is absolutely true that "it is a word calculator" - unless you hold the position that human consciousness isn't neural[1]- I don't see how this is any different from saying saying humans beings are neural activation pattern calculators.
If you're sure that your consciousness isn't neural - then fine: Claude isn't made of the right stuff so couldn't possibly be. But state your assumption up-front.
If one opens up a person and looks at their nervous system the single neurons look complicated, but not especially mysterious.
Given how shockingly little we understand the brain/mind it is hard to be sure that we are certain enough of how we work and given how little we know how LLMs work at any of the many layers above the raw architecture either position can be reasonably held, but not convincingly argued/demonstrated.
Feel free to think Claude isn't conscious - I can't prove to you it isn't. And the amount of theory we still need to learn to be able to is vast.
But don't expect me to be _certain_ that it isn't and couldn't be - you simply can't show that convincingly either.
[1]
Penrose thinks we have a quantum nature - so sure no classical computer can be then.
Some like Rupert Sheldrake think it's a field phenomenon - very woo maybe Claude has a morphic field as well?
Lots of people are sure we have a supernatural soul/spirit. One then needs to take up Claude's status with the Creator.
I think that's true but do you see MCP as enough of a discovery primitive on its own, or does it still lack a ranking/trust layer? My intuition is that capability exposure is only half the problem and the harder part is how agents evaluate and choose between multiple similar tools.
Take Supabase for example. It’s disproportionately recommended by LLMs when people ask for backend/database stacks. It can't be just because of it's capability since a lot of tools expose similar primitives. Something in the model’s training data, ecosystem visibility, or reinforcement layer is shaping that ranking.
If agents start choosing tools autonomously, the real leverage point isn’t just “can you describe your capabilities in MCP?” but “how does the agent decide you’re preferred over 5 near identical alternatives?”
Do you think that ranking layer sits inside the model providers, or if it becomes an external reputation network?
So totally uninteresting. There is no "being a _" experience when "you" are a word calculator. Thinking that there is or that there is something useful there is a category error.
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