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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

#141

Post by ineedasername »

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[…

Theoretically, perhaps.

But keep in mind that a simulation is, well, a simulation. Artificial consciousness may be possible. It may also be possible to simulate something with a surface appearance indistinguishable from consciousness but not actually be consciousness, while actual consciousness would require very different methods.

When thinking about these things we have to draw a line between something that can fool gross human perception and something that is actually conscious. Right now we don't even know enough to know what the tools required to make such a determination would look like. It may very well be that, from an ethical standpoint, we'll need to ascribe consciousness to systems for year or decades before we're able to determine if it's real or the equivalent of a very convincing optical illusion.

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

#142

Post by namarie »

antonvs wrote: post #123
namarie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it's like asking "if a part of the Mechanical Turk (namely the chess player) always has to be present to play chess, does that mean there isn't a chess player there?"

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

#143

Post by threefourteen »

timthorn wrote: post #127
deltaonefour wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Much good science was done in spite of the faiths as Galileo would testify. The Church was accepting the science when there was absolutely no other way.

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

#144

Post by ineedasername »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #138
antonvs wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 beyo…

> You can't bash someone in the head with it in the physical world, for example. You can bash someone in the head with it in the simulated world though, and if you simulate that person's head well enough it will be just as painful for them as it would be for a real world person.

That's tautological. We are using the thought experiment of a simulated rock to reason our way into simulated consciousness. Therefore you cannot presuppose a simulated rock to induce pain-- a property of consciousness-- before you have properly established the simulated rock. Otherwise you are saying "I know we can simulate consciousness (via simated pain) because we can simaulate the rock. And I know we can simulate the rock because it causes simulated pain (which requires consciousness)." Tautology.

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

#145

Post by QuantumGood »

A common AI theme I don't see mentioned in comments here is how AI is less mastering extraordinary things than how it reveals what humans do is simpler than we thought. Proof that humans are sentient is not based on how we are a "general (A)I", but something more specific. Yet sentience is held as a kind of higher (religious?) standard by some of the value of intelligence.

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

#146

Post by morelisp »

timthorn wrote: post #127
deltaonefour wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're discussing specifically mysticism here, which has a much stronger claim to have a fundamental dichotomy with science. (Regardless of which creed it's associated with.)

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

#147

Post by swid »

closedloop129 wrote: post #102
swid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reasonable time frame is not a requirement of the argument I was trying to make. I’m saying that there is nothing inherently missing from a silicon based computer or Turing complete language to support human level intelligence.

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

#148

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

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…

>I'm surprised he would be so taken in. Presumably he understands the inner workings.

Just because you understand in theory how a system works does not mean you are immune to its effects. I can see how the more you use a system the more you are convinced about its intended function. I got the idea from the article that the engineer was more involved with the testing rather than the creation. So LaMDA has gotten to a point where it's coming up with responses that seem so real no matter how hard testers try to make it fail. That's impressive. It has gotten good enough to fool everyday testers. Think about how the same system will affect everyday people who have no AI training. We're at the edge of some very large societal changes due to AI. It may not be sentient but it's a great simulation. Similar to how 3D engines seem to be getting closer to duplicating the way we see the world. It's not there but it's getting so close that in time we won't be able to tell the difference. Except that in LaMDA it's happening in language processing. It's not sentient but, I deduce, it's an amazing simulation.

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

#149

Post by swid »

deltaonefour wrote: post #115
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.

Simple is an ambiguous term. A simple cell is still very complex by other measures.

No matter how simple or complex, is it possible to implement the rules of simulated universe on a computer? Can biology be simulated (however slowly) on a computer?

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

#150

Post by threefourteen »

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?

I'm just saying that I would think twice before agreeing on letting an alcoholic run a bar or a short-sighted person flying a fighter jet.
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