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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

#111

Post by deltaonefour »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #71
threefourteen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Science is at odds with religion anyway. The two things are fundamental opposites.

You can set moral standards to not discriminate. But when you judge the situation dispassionately without polluting the logic with "morals" the discrimination makes factual sense. Religion is the opposite of science.

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

#112

Post by Thiez »

skohan wrote: post #53
snek_case wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consciou…

At what level of fidelity? 1 synapse == 1 16-bit floating point value? It may be enough (emphasis on may), for a specific brain region which is very directional in nature but I'm not sure if that calculation will generalize.

The brain is a pretty messy place. While our bodies try hard to preserve homeostasis, conditions will always vary slightly. Hormones affect our brains and can vary in concentration from moment to moment. Type 1 diabetics can easily have their blood sugar increase by a factor of 4, without losing consciousness. There are many other chemicals and conditions (temperature?) that similarly influence the condinions under which our neurons must operate.

But even in this noisy environment, our brains can usually operate just fine. Given this level of background noise, I would be very surprised if the average synapse would require more than a 16-bit floating point value for its outputs.

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

#114

Post by 0des »

deltaonefour wrote: post #108
armitron wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 r…

i can respect that.

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

#115

Post by deltaonefour »

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…

>the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules

It does not. The rules are very complex. Schrodinger's equation is incredibly hard to solve. And we don't even know all the rules or if our current model of the rules is correct.

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

#116

Post by deltaonefour »

squabble wrote: post #99

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness Consciousness is not well defined. To me, this indicates that we don't really know what's going on.

Other way around.

Consciousness is a loaded word. It tricks you into thinking that there's some profound concept here. There isn't.

When you contemplate consciousness you're not contemplating about anything profound. You're actually just contemplating vocabulary and how to map out the exact definition of the word "consciousness"

Really all it is, is just studying a collection of arbitrary intellectual attributes that we're not clear about which attributes are encompassed in the word "consciousness." Thinking about it results in just a large categorization problem of stating axioms like: " oh consciousness must include the ability to be sad" and other random attribute selection stuff.

It is a language phenomenon not a philosophical phenomenon. Don't fall for the trap. It is similar to the question what is "life." Well "life" is also another loaded word.

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

#117

Post by skohan »

Thiez wrote: post #112
skohan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what level of fidelity? 1 synapse == 1 16-bit floating point value? It may be enough (emphasis on may), for a specific brain region which is very directional in nature but I'm not sure if that calculation will generalize.

The brain is a pretty messy place. While our bodies try hard to preserve homeostasis, conditions will always vary slightly. Hormones affect our brains and can vary in concentration from moment to moment. Type 1 diabetics can easily have their blood sugar increase by a factor of 4, without losing consciousness. There are many other chemicals and conditions (temperature?) that similarly influence the condinions under w…

Counter argument:

Some synapses contain multiple receptor sub-types. Dopamine, for example, has some receptors which are inhibitory, and others which are excitatory. Each receptor is sensitive to different concentrations of dopamine. This gives the effect that when the dopamine concentrations in the synapse are low, this synapse acts to inhibit the activity of the efferent neuron, while when the concentration reaches a certain threshold, the output of the synapse flips to an excitatory signal.

How would you model that system with a single F16?

And that's just one example: for instance there are specific signals which trigger cascading effects in the neuron which up-regulate certain chemical pathways, causing an amplifying effect on other signals.

Or you have shunting effects, where an inhibitory synapse placed at a certain point in the dendritic arbor serves to selectively cancel signals from farther down that one specific branch of the dendrite.

That's not "noise" - the brain has incredibly refined and detailed mechanisms for information processing which go very far beyond `weight * sigmoid(activation) = output`

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

#118

Post by sokoloff »

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_…

I wonder in what areas of science are we living/will we be viewed by future humans in a similar light as we view adherents of the “4 Elements” theory big nature are viewed today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element

Quantum theory is only around 100 years old. Maybe we’ve got everything right, but I suspect we’re not the first people to have that thought and therefore we’re probably due for significant learning about the universe in the next 100 years.

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

#119

Post by barneygale »

feet wrote: post #61
dekhn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think the many worlds interpretation provides any value. I only care about what is experimentally determinable.

100% agree. Theory is nice but meaningless until we have evidence

Like all interpretations of quantum mechanics, then.

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

#120

Post by AgentME »

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…

If it could talk in conversations in a 100% human way, then we would be at the precipice of the singularity. Society would be completely transformed as people made friends with bots, as the bots made discoveries and participated in online communities, as people hired bots in place of people, as bots bought more computers for more bots, as online culture got overwhelmingly full of intelligent bots, as bots used their knowledge and money to make themselves more powerful, etc. We're not going to discover that bots reached human-level intelligence by seeing them quote bog-standard sci-fi dialog they've seen in their training sets many times. The signs are going to be undeniable when they're competing with us and often outcompeting us through their digital and easily replicatable nature. And at that point, the question won't be whether we give them rights or not. It will be whether they let us have a functioning society we can participate in.

The idea that the biggest dilemma will be whether we give AI rights or not is purely a storytelling trope from stories that use AI as a metaphor for oppressed people. If it ever becomes a relevant issue for us, it will be a very short-lived issue that gets eclipsed by much bigger issues.

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