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

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

#41

Post by katmannthree »

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

Counter-counterexample: Superdeterminism.

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

#42

Post by jonnycomputer »

armitron wrote: post #21
bitshiftfaced wrote: post #11

I'm surprised he would be so taken in. Presumably he understands the inner workings. He even had to show the author how to prompt it so it would sound more sentient. To me, this is like pulling back to curtains to reveal the "trick." When you prompt it as though it's a chat bot, it will reply with the most statistically likely response, given that prompt. What's the most statistically likely response when you've shap…

“Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult.” I stopped reading after this.

why?

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

#43

Post by swid »

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

It may not be needed for consciousness, but even if it is, we can simulate quantum mechanics on traditional hardware, just slowly compared to real life. This is why I brought up possible optimizations to the real world.

If it takes us 100 years to simulate 1 second of consciousness with quantum effects, the consciousness will just experience time differently than we do.

Personally, I think we don’t need to take quantum effects into account to achieve consciousness.

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

#44

Post by threefourteen »

Cached https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=The+Google+engineer+who+th...

Also it sounds to me that the gist of the matter is in:

>> Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult. Inside Google’s anything-goes engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a respectable science.

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

#45

Post by virgildotcodes »

dekhn wrote: post #35
feet wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's my understanding that the many worlds interpretation puts us back on track for a fully deterministic universe, no?

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

#46

Post by galcerte »

skohan wrote: post #36
shkkmo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quantum algorithms analogous to convolutional neural networks are O(log N) instead of O(N), so I'd wager we really do need something like that, or at least some other sort of analog hardware, given how complicated it is to do calculations on a QC.

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

#47

Post by feet »

dekhn wrote: post #35
feet wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding was that we don't have the ability to predict collapse, but that doesn't make it nondeterministic. I could be wrong about this, physics is not my field

If there is no connection between wave function collapse and macroscopic biological systems, then that would mean that it doesn't matter. The macroscopic/biochemical world is still deterministic

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

#48

Post by labrador »

Just because some entity feels sentient doesn't mean it is sentient. I had this experience with a chess program that was beating me in the 1980's. It felt alive. Many people talk to trees and feel they answer back. Anthropomorphism is a well know phenomenon. It follows that the general public will believe that an AI that mimics a person actually is a person because they won't have the training to recognize ways in which the AI is not a person, but very clever computer programs.

The most interesting thing about this is an AI that mimics a spiritual guru so well that people start following it. This combination of clever programming and the programmer behind the code will be very seductive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/9/20851753/ai-reli...

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

#49

Post by swid »

shkkmo wrote: post #40
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 a…

I agree with that - maybe the only practical way to get a human brain map of sufficient detail to fully simulate is to grow it virtually, and maybe this would take too long compared to a human life.

I think it’s just a useful starting point to make the argument it is possible given infinite time and perfect data. Then, we can ask how much can be optimized and how to get the structure needed digitized.

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

#50

Post by snek_case »

skohan wrote: post #33
snek_case wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 V…

No, scaling a model of V1 would not yield consciousness.

The point is that V1 is a large part of the visual cortex. It's something the brain dedicates a lot of resources to, and we could implement something similar in silicon almost trivially. Your smartphone GPU may have enough compute to simulate an equivalent computation at 200 frames per second.

It's possible that in the future, we'll be able to simulate consciousness very efficiently once we have a better handle on the kinds of computations that are involved, much more efficiently than what the brain does.

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