A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life • Hacker News Board

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#31

Post by shkkmo » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #9

arkitaip wrote: post #3

I'm not seeing lots of proof that Lambda is sentient but I do see compelling evidence that it might not matter if people believe that the AI is human enough. Most people, myself included, probably couldn't tell that Lambda was a program.

Isn't this the Chinese room thing? In general, an A is a B in some context if you can't tell the difference within that context. The bar might not be that high. If the little customer service chat with my bank behaves like a person, isn't it as good?

That's the turring test.

The chinese room is sort of intended as a refutation of the ideas contained in the turring test. I postulates a system that would pass a turring like test but argues that there isn't any component of that system that has 'understanding' to which the general response is that it is the combined system which 'understands'.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#32

Post by naveen99 » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

Enough people followed the dead tree versions of the Bible and Koran for enough time. bert-jesus, bert-Mohammed, and bert-stallman will probably be even more persuasive.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#33

Post by skohan » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

snek_case wrote: post #20

yCombLinks wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but a large portion of that is not involved in the higher level thought processes we care about when we talk about AI. AI doesn't have to micromanage a physical body.

Yeah, IMO if you want a rough idea about how much compute the human brain performs, and how efficiently you could do that in silicon, it's interesting to look at area V1 which is one of the lowest level areas involved in vision. This brain area comprises 140 million neurons per hemisphere (so roughly 280 million in total). So that's about 1/300 of the human brain. The interesting thing here is, what V1 does is it com…

I have my doubts about whether just scaling a model of V1 would be sufficient to reproduce consciousness. Structure and function are extremely closely linked in the nervous system, and neural circuitry is highly specialized in terms of structure to support a given function. E.g., motor cortex is going to be vastly different from auditory cortex and so on. Assuming that because we have 1st level feature detection in V1 fairly well understood and reproduced, we have solved neuroscience in general strikes me as a massive and unjustified leap of faith.

If there were a brain region that might be emulated to reproduce "general information processing", the best candidate would probably be neocortex. As far as I am aware, that does seem to be a very wide region of the brain which has fairly consistent structure, and largely serves to integrate all other systems.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#34

Post by armitron » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 2:55 PM UTC

williamtrask wrote: post #29

swid wrote: post #23

The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there… I believe two things: -1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousn…

Assumption: determinism Counterexample: quantum mechanics

Assumption: consciousness depends on quantum effects in the brain

Counterexample: quantum effects are rare in non-atomic scale, no data whatsoever that indicates they are involved in high level brain functions, rather a lot of data pointing towards the opposite, given rapid progress in modeling said functions.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#35

Post by dekhn » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

feet wrote: post #30

williamtrask wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assumption: determinism Counterexample: quantum mechanics

What, exactly, in quantum mechanics is nondeterministic and how does that translate to nondeterministicness in the macroscopic/biochemical world?

wavefunction collapse is nondeterministic (at least, that's my simple understanding). There is no known relationship between wavefunction collapse macroscopic biological systems. There are examples of quantum coherence, though.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#36

Post by skohan » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #24

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not commenting on the claims of the article, just the points in your comment. I think it's pretty clear that an entire human brain is not required for the operation of consciousness. Certain people have lost massive portions of their brain and still maintained regular consciousness functioning. On top of that, the typical human brain only consumes about 20 watts of power to do its thing. So that's just a safe upp…

I think that you need more than just computing power, you need high levels of interconnection with low latency. So while we undoubtedly have sufficient aggregate computing power, I don't think it is structured in a way that would allow it to emulate human cognition and problem sovling, not just pattern recognition. That said, consciousness is an incredibly heterogeneously defined term but can probably be pretty widel…

That's a very good point - a key feature of the brain is that it's a highly dynamical system with a huge number of variables.

Neurons are all giving each-other feedback in real time, which leads to emergent behavior. To really reproduce this, you would probably need a very different hardware paradigm.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#37

Post by gonehome » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

swid wrote: post #23

The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there… I believe two things: -1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousn…

The double negatives in your first sentence are hard to parse.

I think I agree with what you’re arguing though. Basically the scaling hypothesis.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#38

Post by stale2002 » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

williamtrask wrote: post #29

swid wrote: post #23

The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there… I believe two things: -1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousn…

Assumption: determinism Counterexample: quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics isn't a blocker here.

Even if you think quantum mechanics are a necessary part of consciousness, we could use quantum mechanics to simulate quantum mechanics.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#39

Post by thfuran » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 3:04 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #9

arkitaip wrote: post #3

I'm not seeing lots of proof that Lambda is sentient but I do see compelling evidence that it might not matter if people believe that the AI is human enough. Most people, myself included, probably couldn't tell that Lambda was a program.

Isn't this the Chinese room thing? In general, an A is a B in some context if you can't tell the difference within that context. The bar might not be that high. If the little customer service chat with my bank behaves like a person, isn't it as good?

That's an extremely low bar. Most t1 support people are basically constrained to act like robots by being given a script and no authority.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#40

Post by shkkmo » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 3:04 PM UTC

swid wrote: post #23

The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there… I believe two things: -1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousn…

There are plenty of behaviors of complex systems that we still struggle to model accurately. While we may be able to build conscious, sapient entities, I think that accurate modeling of human cognition, especially and individual human's cognition, may well be much, much further off, if at all possible.

While quantum effects may or may not be directly involved in human cognition, the fundemental difficulties getting an accurate measure of brain state may prevent us from doing any more that making a rough copy.