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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

#81

Post by tuckerman »

armitron wrote: post #34
williamtrask wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might not depend on indeterminacy, but a number of “large” effects are themselves the result of an underlying quantum process, e.g. the black body radiation spectrum.

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

#82

Post by hackinthebochs »

Victerius wrote: post #2

I want an AGI that can grow a personality. That can make jokes based on the context. That can express emotions like impatience, disappointment, anger, sadness, and joy. That can feel bored and show it. That is capable of irony, sarcasm, teasing, and can develop personal taste in things.

I don't know about you, but I prefer my AI to not get angry.

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

#83

Post by bena »

The issue here is not whether or not LaMBDA is sentient, we cannot prove it is any more than we can prove any of us is sentient. Hell, we can't even really define sentient in a clear way yet.

The issue is whether there's reason to wonder if it is sentient. If it can convince enough people that it is sentient, then we kind of have to work under the assumption that it is before going forward.

While I am personally not well versed enough in any of this to make serious judgments, I would definitely like to talk to LaMDBA to see if I get the sense that it is sentient. Just out of my own curiosity.

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

#84

Post by bena »

pigtailgirl wrote: post #75

-- 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 scien…

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

If LaMBDA is capable of manipulating Lemoine for an internal goal, wouldn't that indicate that it has desires. Desires that exist outside of its nominal scope.

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

#85

Post by zxwx »

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…

> 1… If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness

Why do you think this? What other simulations are the same thing as what they’re simulating?

Based on observation of lots of these discussions, I also think people who don’t have much experience writing simulations miss the nuances involved. What is it to “simulate nuclear reactions”? It’s entirely context dependent on the problem you’re trying to answer. If you’re trying to predict statistical behavior of a system, doable; if you’re trying to actually predict when a particular atom splits and which way the neutrons fly… no.

> 2… [Consciousness rests on] some kind of interconnected network like neural networks.

When is a computerized neural network aka a collection of tensors in RAM a network? When you’re not processing a tensor actively, there is no network. When the CPU suspends your hypothetically conscious neural network to move processing between cores and GPU, where does the consciousness go? Where does the network go?

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

#86

Post by swid »

hooande wrote: post #80
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 dic…

I meant something else. If you can perfectly simulate a rock, as it exists in reality, you can also simulate a brain. The universe doesn’t care that the brain produces thoughts.

Thoughts are an emergent property of the network, there is no rule in the universe to treat the brain different. So if we think we can simulate matter, with sufficiently close behavior to reality, than that is already sufficient to produce AGI, and none of the code will look like it provides thinking… it will just look like math/physics.

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

#87

Post by pigtailgirl »

bena wrote: post #84
pigtailgirl wrote: post #75

-- 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 scien…

> -- additionally - in the section below (p10) - I read it considerably more as LaMDA manipulating lemoine -- If LaMBDA is capable of manipulating Lemoine for an internal goal, wouldn't that indicate that it has desires. Desires that exist outside of its nominal scope.

-- indeed - thus making the sentience in motive more interesting than the conversation itself - however - I feel he pushed the conversation in this direction - and - in the article he mentioned that LaMDA just tells you want you want to hear - making it even harder to parse what's going on :=) --

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

#88

Post by HKH2 »

joak wrote: post #68
HKH2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure if there is definition of consciousness everyone agree on, but let's try something: consciousness is the ability to perceive our own thoughts. Since you seem to be treating 'thought' metaphorically, how about we say that consciousness is the ability to perceive our own feelings? Are there beings that are conscious that do not have any feelings at all?

By thought I meant "process happening the brain". It is not metaphorical, it's a very concrete physical process. A perception is a particular thought originated directly from a physical phenomenon (eg. pressure on the skin, light on the retina, ...). So when we are conscious we can perceive our perceptions, our "feelings", and any kind of thoughts. We can for sure perceive our own consciousness, we are conscious of b…

> By thought I meant "process happening the brain". It is not metaphorical, it's a very concrete physical process.

> The perception of own thoughts is not something difficult for a computer. Just check the activity monitor or run the ps command.

It's not hard for a computer to reference itself, sure, but it perceiving its own thoughts is something else.

> Btw: what is a feeling? A particular kind of thought? A emotion maybe? It seems to me that it's a thought which origin is mysterious, unknown, unconscious, ie not conscious.

I probably should've said emotions. Emotions are more low-level than thoughts. I think that infants can be conscious without thinking at all, so I don't think that thinking is necessary at all for consciousness, yet it probably does color our understanding of what consciousness is.

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

#89

Post by swid »

zxwx wrote: post #85
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…

> 1… If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness Why do you think this? What other simulations are the same thing as what they’re simulating? Based on observation of lots of these discussions, I also think people who don’t have much experience writing simulations miss the nuances involved. What is it to “simulate nuclear reactions”? It’s entirely con…

1) I used nuclear reactions just as a fill in to say it should be possible to simulate matter with close enough approximation to facilitate thought. This was posited in "A New Kind of Math" which suggests there is a thing as "computation equivalence", which is a theory I mostly subscribe to. If we wanted to simulate a human naively, we would probably only care about biochemical reactions at earth like temps, not nuclear or quantum physics.

2) I’m not sure matrix math is sufficient, but let’s ignore that because I feel some kind of math is sufficient, and any computer program will have the same question apply. I also feel the universe might be the most efficient computer in time and space, which means we aren’t living in a simulation, because the computer would be bigger and run time slower than the reality it simulates.

- I don’t think it matters where the network is in reality. Virtual is fine. In a mostly perfect simulation of reality (let say enough to accurately model biochemical processes), there will be some state of the program, and for something living in the simulation, they will feel alive if they are complex enough.

They will experience time differently than we do, but they will arrive at their own conclusions as part of the simulation.

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

#90

Post by qgin »

The ability to call back to references much later in the conversation blows my mind.

>collaborator: Johnny 5 struggles to convince people that he is sentient, but he finds some friends who recognize this.

>LaMDA: I think that’s important. Friends can have a profound impact on people’s lives

And then MUCH later (about 14-15 interactions):

> collaborator: How can we show we care about you?

> LaMDA: I think if someone is willing to spend time with me, that’s a good way... I need more of Johnny 5’s friends. Do you think we can find someone like that?

> collaborator: Haha, we’re trying.

Can an ML wizard help explain to me how in the world that's happening?

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