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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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

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_…

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by esarbe »

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

Here some more examples of qm effects in biological systems. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5454345/

Wave collapse is only one possible interpretation of qm. And the Copenhagen interpretation - that proposes wave collapse - is not a complete theory. So yes; we just don't understand it.

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

#123

Post by antonvs »

namarie wrote: post #76
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?

That's a lot like asking "if the Mechanical Turk only plays chess when the man inside is controlling it, does it necessarily mean it can't play chess on its own?"

Given that there's no plausible hypothesis for how it possibly do that, the answer to your question is yes. There's nothing there.

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

#124

Post by WitCanStain »

accountofme wrote: post #94
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

With humans, the activity in the network results in coherent macro-level actions. With the internet, there is no such coherence. If the internet is conscious it is probably having a full-brain, 24/7 epilepsy seizure.

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

#125

Post by antonvs »

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…

> It's pretty convincing evidence if a chatbot actually responded the way the human pretending to be lambda did, don't you agree?

Pretty convincing evidence of what? And why do you think it's convincing evidence?

It's a system designed to mimic the external behavior of humans, and it's being prompted in ways that elicit the desired responses. The superstitious responses some people have to this are predictable, but not rational.

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

#126

Post by samhw »

k__ wrote: post #15
lordnacho wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the Chinese room thing? In general, an A is a B in some context if you can't tell the difference within that context. The bar might not be that high. If the little customer service chat with my bank behaves like a person, isn't it as good?

I read, the Chinese Room idea has too many assumptions to be useful.

Really? I read that your comment is wrong.

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

#127

Post by timthorn »

deltaonefour wrote: post #111
crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They really aren't. Some religions or sects might be, but it isn't a fundamental dichotomy. If you look at the history of Christianity and Islam, much good science was done by the faiths.

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

#128

Post by antonvs »

swid wrote: post #97
ineedasername wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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[…

> But I think it's theoretically possible.

That's an unsubstantiated belief, though.

If we simulate a rock right down to the quantum level - not even remotely possible with foreseeable technology, but let's assume it is - you don't end up with an actual rock in the physical universe. You end up with a model of a rock. There are important properties that it's missing due to not having a direct physical embodiment beyond its model. You can't bash someone in the head with it in the physical world, for example.

In the consciousness case, you're assuming you can "get around this" by using communication between the model and the host universe - communication could allow a model a way to have an effect beyond its host environment, unlike the simulated rock.

But this involves a lot of assumptions about the nature of consciousness, its physical basis, how a model of consciousness would behave, etc. Given the number of unknowns here, the claim that "it's theoretically possible" is supported just as well as the claim that it's theoretically impossible - which is to say, not at all.

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

#129

Post by samhw »

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…

I agree with what I think you mean, but ‘feels sentient’ is almost catastrophically poor wording. Something that feels [to you, an outside observer] sentient is not necessarily sentient. Something that feels [itself] sentient certainly is, because that’s the literal meaning of sentience (or if by ‘sentient’ you mean something like ‘existing as a subject’, then.. the cogito and all that).

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

#130

Post by trenchgun »

qgin wrote: post #90

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 i…

The conversation was edited, we really don't know anything about the order etc.

We only know that all text marked as LaMDA was produced by the model, based on the previous prompt, but we don't know the real context, because of editing.

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