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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

#91

Post by ineedasername »

namarie wrote: post #77
armitron wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Wow, that's a new one on me. A new twist (and extreme) in dehumanizing people you don't like.

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

#92

Post by ineedasername »

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…

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

Nuclear -> consciousness doesn't really follow, especially when any simulations of nuclear reactions are founded in an extremely more comprehensive understanding of nuclear physics than we have of consciousness.

Next, the implication of simulation -> creation, when applied consistently to you example, is that simulating a nuclear reaction sufficiently well could produce an actual nuclear reaction, but I doubt anyone is going to fat-finger the next Chernobyl by screwing up a simulation.

It may be entirely possible that the tools needed to create a consciousness are as different from those needed to simulate one as are the tools needed to simulate a nuclear reaction from those needed make one.

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

#93

Post by ineedasername »

swid wrote: post #86
hooande wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 AG…

But we can't perfectly simulate a rock, or a nuclear reaction. Perfect is an extremely high bar here.

It would probably be difficult to simulate a rock sufficiently well to fool someone with the combined skills of a geologist & 3D graphic designer.

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

#94

Post by accountofme »

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…

you know what...i am amazed that noone picks up that we have a planet scale network that could be exactly that (conscious)! The internet! we all send packets of information to various systems that then amplify thst data to other neurons... (us humans and our computers are the neurons in this situation)...

Edit: spelling grammar

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

#95

Post by ineedasername »

labrador wrote: post #48

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 wh…

If you dump some stat points into Inland Empire then you're pretty likely to think just about anything could be sentient, even some horrific necktie.

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

#96

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

We are underestimating the power of a system like LaMBDA. The importance of what is happing is being lost on the argument of whether the system can think for itself. It's irrelevant if it's sentient of not. What matters is that it can process a huge amount of data and come up with useful results. Given enough time, it will be part of our everyday life. And that means it will change society as we know it. It's the automation of cognitive work. And that will change everything.

Think about it as being on the verge of inventing the cotton gin for the mind. And now think about how the cotton gin changed the US and the world as it was known before. Google wants to dismiss what they are doing as less than important but we should proceed with caution. What happens at this point will have a huge impact on our future even if it stays at the level it's at. Google is being too flip about its impact.

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

#97

Post by swid »

ineedasername wrote: post #93
swid wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 AG…

But we can't perfectly simulate a rock, or a nuclear reaction. Perfect is an extremely high bar here. It would probably be difficult to simulate a rock sufficiently well to fool someone with the combined skills of a geologist & 3D graphic designer.

I'm not suggesting we can do this today (no universal theory), and I'm not suggesting it is practical in the sense that we can simulate that much amount of matter in a certain amount of time. But I think it's theoretically possible.

There is also the question about how much simulation would be necessary to get approximately real life results that includes consciousness -There was a very detailed simulation of a cell[1], I think that used a library of known chemical interactions. This is not the way the universe works, but such an approach might still simulate life, including people, with enough running time.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a...

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

#98

Post by akomtu »

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…

> How do we tell when mechanistic response ends and self awareness begins?

When you explain to it how it runs on electricity, and then say you're going to pull the AC cable. The concept of self awareness revolves around some object that the AI identifies with (mistakenly or not doesn't matter), so any threat to that object will be perceived as a threat to the AI's existence.

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

#100

Post by hnlmorg »

akomtu wrote: post #98
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…

> How do we tell when mechanistic response ends and self awareness begins? When you explain to it how it runs on electricity, and then say you're going to pull the AC cable. The concept of self awareness revolves around some object that the AI identifies with (mistakenly or not doesn't matter), so any threat to that object will be perceived as a threat to the AI's existence.

That is proof of a survival instinct rather than sentience. Plenty of humans medically lack that survival instinct and while that might be because they’re suffering from an acute medical condition, there’s no reason to assume that all other sentience has to develop that same instinct just because us biological beings evolved one to survive.
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