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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

#101

Post by hnlmorg »

russellbeattie wrote: post #69

So this AI has been trained on conversational data. It seems to have opinions and can express why it has them for general knowledge questions. Now, what happens when you dump in a bunch of detailed knowledge? Can you give it an advanced CS or EE degree, for example? Just dump in all the textbooks for training and then ask it to design the next version of itself to meet specific speed goals? Then I'll believe it's sen…

You’re testing a systems ability to understand and design, not it’s sentience.

A good counter test here is to throw all the medical material at 100 people and ask them to design another human. How many people would manage that successfully?

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

#102

Post by closedloop129 »

swid wrote: post #89
zxwx wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nucl…

> 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.

If we can use Quantum Computers to hugely accelerate some calculations, then you can't use regular computers to accurately simulate nuclear reactions in a reasonable time frame.

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

#103

Post by [deleted] »

meowface wrote: post #56
jonnycomputer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why?

I kept reading after it: even without it, it had already seemed very clear to me this person had a religious, not a rational, belief in the AI's sentience. With it, plus everything afterwards, it just seemed even more clear. I think none of his colleagues or supervisors are taking him seriously because there isn't anything to take seriously. It definitely does open interesting questions, though. Google's ethics team…

[deleted]

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

#104

Post by kfrzcode »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #96

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 aut…

It's like Watson had a baby that went to work at Google

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

#105

Post by kfrzcode »

gilbetron wrote: post #14
sylware wrote: post #4

Do you realize the size of the silicium system you need to reach real time simulation of 1 human brain complexity (at the neuron/synapse level)? Anybody did run the numbers? Not to mention the recent discoveries that the human neuron/synapse encode way more states than expected.

Google has a few million hosts in it's datacenter. Each host has a few CPUs. Each CPU has a few billion transistors. That means there are on the order of 10s or 100s quadrillion transistors at Google. The human brain has around a quadrillion synapses. So, the rough numbers are there. Of course, that assumes the brain is like a computer, at all - my favorite hacker news comment someone made was the idea that maybe the…

We're the expression of consciousness; dipping itself into the world for a moment. The world we live in is made of the fabric of dreams; all our live is shrouded in eons of slumber.

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

#106

Post by kfrzcode »

yCombLinks wrote: post #7
sylware wrote: post #4

Do you realize the size of the silicium system you need to reach real time simulation of 1 human brain complexity (at the neuron/synapse level)? Anybody did run the numbers? Not to mention the recent discoveries that the human neuron/synapse encode way more states than expected.

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.

The body is just the brain's energy and survival system; biology is superficial

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

#108

Post by deltaonefour »

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.

Nah this is bad. It's like you stop watching Tom Cruise action movies because he's a Scientologist.

Yeah if you're part of some cult I may think you're crazy but I'm unbiased enough to judge your claim without judging your crazy background which has nothing to do with your claim.

You should read the conversation he had with the person pretending to be a chatbot. It's pretty convincing evidence if a chatbot actually responded the way the human pretending to be lambda did, don't you agree?

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

#109

Post by seanp2k2 »

ineedasername wrote: post #91
namarie wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, heard some kids (like highschool age) in the Bay Area saying this last week in a park.

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

#110

Post by deltaonefour »

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…

You can't be scientifically objective about sentience.

First of all sentience is a loaded word it's not even fully defined. Is a mouse or a bug sentient but this AI clearly is not? It's not clear, but that an artifact of the word "sentient" which itself is just a word that is ambiguously defined.

Second, what exactly is the scientific test you would run to judge if something is sentient? It's hard to test, especially given the fact that the word isn't even formally defined.

>What I find really odd though is that, given his background, Google actually assigned him to such a task.

This would be a form of discrimination and is illegal if they assigned him jobs based off of his religious background. They assigned him jobs while ignoring his religious background which makes sense.

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