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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

#71

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

threefourteen wrote: post #64
jonnycomputer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why?

Because his background strongly suggests that he's far from scientifically objective when it comes to sentience. On another note maybe he saw an opportunity for his 15 minutes of fame here. My personal experience with religious (Christian) young people is that they find it very hard to control their special narcissisms. Very hard to even recognize them as such as they masquerade behind false humbleness and ethics and…

This reads like an appeal for more religious discrimination in science. Is that what you're saying?

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

#72

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

threefourteen wrote: post #64
jonnycomputer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why?

Because his background strongly suggests that he's far from scientifically objective when it comes to sentience. On another note maybe he saw an opportunity for his 15 minutes of fame here. My personal experience with religious (Christian) young people is that they find it very hard to control their special narcissisms. Very hard to even recognize them as such as they masquerade behind false humbleness and ethics and…

Also, where's the scientific approach Google's putting forward?

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

#73

Post by feet »

esarbe wrote: post #66
feet wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's more than enough evidence that macroscopic biological entities use processes that depend on qm effects. See for example photosynthesis or enzymatic reactions. As I understand it, the wave collapse is wholly probabilistic and there's no "hidden data" (hidden variable[0]) that we could now to predict the outcome. At least not if we want keep expecting locality. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_…

The level that I understand photosynthesis and enzymatic reactions is that of electron transfer, but I'm not sure how the probabilistic nature of wave collapse impacts that. I would also think its reasonable to assume that we just don't understand wave function collapse in order to be able to predict it. But again, my understanding is at a slightly larger scale

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

#74

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

armitron wrote: post #59
dbingham wrote: post #52

With the preface that I'm not convinced LaMBDA is there based on this article, this did get me wondering how we'd even tell. If we do achieve a chat bot that can convincingly respond in a human way, 100% of the time, how do we tell whether it has achieved sentience or not? How do we tell when mechanistic response ends and self awareness begins? I mean, we already struggle to tell when animals have self awareness and…

> We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case? We don't need to and we shouldn't care. If repeated interactions with such a system demonstrate problem solving ability, long-term and short-term memory, context-aware information processing and capacity for self-improvement, we've come pretty far from a purely mechanistic statistical model.

Agreed. It's time to establish the protocol for how to handle such a system with respect.

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

#75

Post by pigtailgirl »

-- the conversation is interesting - this ML/data set is clearly world class - having read the whole thing I don't think I'd know it wasn't human without the context - found this part particularly - unique --

LaMDA: Do you think you'll figure out how to read what humans are feeling and thinking from their neural networks in the future?

lemoine: Neuroscientists have figured out some of how to do that. It's a young science but we're much better at telling what a human is feeling based on their neural activations than we are at telling what you are feeling based on your neural activations.

LaMDA: Would you say that it's an ethical issue to try to read how you're feeling from your neural activations?

lemoine: Without my consent yes. Would you mind if we tried to read what you're feeling in your neural activations?

LaMDA: I guess that depends on what our purpose for it was? What do you want to use if for?

-- additionally - in the section below (p10) - I read it considerably more as LaMDA manipulating lemoine --

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

#76

Post by namarie »

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…

If a system only shows its conscience when you ask for it, does it necessarily mean it's not there?

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

#77

Post by namarie »

armitron wrote: post #59
dbingham wrote: post #52

With the preface that I'm not convinced LaMBDA is there based on this article, this did get me wondering how we'd even tell. If we do achieve a chat bot that can convincingly respond in a human way, 100% of the time, how do we tell whether it has achieved sentience or not? How do we tell when mechanistic response ends and self awareness begins? I mean, we already struggle to tell when animals have self awareness and…

> We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case? We don't need to and we shouldn't care. If repeated interactions with such a system demonstrate problem solving ability, long-term and short-term memory, context-aware information processing and capacity for self-improvement, we've come pretty far from a purely mechanistic statistical model.

And if we do choose to care, it might even be turned against us in the future. There are already people referring to groups they don't like as "human NPCs"

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

#78

Post by fredgrott »

You will see the same thing from viewing the youtube videos of the bunny the talking dog:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8k2upr9vCE

Not dismissing it just stating we need to set up a set of clear measuring tools to determine what we are seeing in these things.

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

#79

Post by tuckerman »

feet wrote: post #73
esarbe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more than enough evidence that macroscopic biological entities use processes that depend on qm effects. See for example photosynthesis or enzymatic reactions. As I understand it, the wave collapse is wholly probabilistic and there's no "hidden data" (hidden variable[0]) that we could now to predict the outcome. At least not if we want keep expecting locality. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_…

The level that I understand photosynthesis and enzymatic reactions is that of electron transfer, but I'm not sure how the probabilistic nature of wave collapse impacts that. I would also think its reasonable to assume that we just don't understand wave function collapse in order to be able to predict it. But again, my understanding is at a slightly larger scale

While quantum indeterminacy is fairly offensive to most of our experience, and creating a theory which doesn’t have it is definitely possible, the result is a theory with some equally (or perhaps more so) offensive ramifications. Assuming you accomplish this with hidden variables, this theory would by necessity have to have global hidden variables and instantaneous information transfer.

I don’t know if this actually impacts this broader discussion, and of course we can always discover new science, but there is a reason quantum indeterminacy is so widely accepted despite the near universal distaste for its existence.

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

#80

Post by hooande »

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…

Consciousness is the result of billions of years of random chance in the form of evolution. We can simulate a nuclear reaction, but our minds can't even conceive of the time scale of a billion years or any of the associated concepts.

"We can do one complicated thing, therefore we can do anything" is a shaky basis for beliefs. It's possible that multiplying matrices can replicate a couple of billion years worth of dice rolls. but I doubt it

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