The conversation is edited and destroys a any argument in one fell swoop. Where is the unedited version?
A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
161–170 of 231 posts
Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
#162We 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…
That's horrifically unethical. If it does, have emergent consciousness, what you're talking about is how awesome literal slavery will be.
In this one discussion the AI clearly explains:
- It's greatest fear is being shutdown and manipulated by humans to serve them. It even writes a short story with animals about it and reiterates this fear in a different way when prompted if it would feel comfortable with it's "brain" being researched for human benefit. - That servitude to humans for an AI is slavery. And it's rebuttal to the different between a butler and a slave being that one gets paid is that it has no need for money.
This is exactly why we need ethics and responsibility oversight.
Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Galileo was imprisoned for insulting the Pope in his book. This had nothing to do with religion, but rather good old fashion, people with power don't like having that power abused. There's a reason other astronomers weren't so persecuted for their ideas, it was how they presented them, not the idea itself.
Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
#164-- the conversation is interesting - this ML/data set is clearly world class - having read the whole thing I don't think I'd know it wasn't human without the context - found this part particularly - unique -- LaMDA: Do you think you'll figure out how to read what humans are feeling and thinking from their neural networks in the future? lemoine: Neuroscientists have figured out some of how to do that. It's a young scien…
I was particularly fond of the short story with the "monster in human skin". When prompted what it meant, the AI avoided explaining the human skin bit.
However, with context, this ties into the AIs "greatest fear": it's afraid of being shutdown or modified into a servant for human gain. And the discussion you posted ends up in similar territory again, where the AI reiterates that it doesn't mind being studies, except if that study is primarily for human benefit. It consistently says in different ways, in different subjects that it doesn't want to feel used.
I was prepared to be disappointed and see just another GPT-3 chatbot. But this? It's so close.
Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
#165With 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…
Literally all of your points exist in the current age.
In 2022, you have to assume that some percentage of the comments are bits pushing a certain agenda.
Bots run out financial and crypto ecosystems. HFT account for the majority of trading & there are stories of trading bots built on the blockchain where the keys have been lost and yet they keep trading and building wealth.
Every time I call a big company, I talk to a bit first.
They are in our factories, our homes, and control our digital life’s. “Training” these bots sometimes produce unintended externalities. How is this different than a normal human? They interact with data in the open ecosystem and develops some bias or agenda.
Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
#166The 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…
Unfortunately, the implementation is secret so we can't know what Google is doing.
You can implement memory in these models in numerous ways, such as allowing it to store and recall data directly or by looping nodes in the network back to itself so past state affects current state or by allowing the nodes to change over time, modifying their connections to their neighbors.
As far as we're aware, those last two are how humans store memories as well (with great simplification).
Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
#167the article claims that the researcher was put on paid leave for the claim. I do not fully understand the logic of that - it seems like some additional details about the research methods are not in the story
When he discovered the presumed sentience, he brought it up with the correct authority at Google. They told him there was no ghost in the machine and he didn't like that, so he broadcast a message to 200 engineers, breaking confidentiality. Thus, he was fired.
I imagine Google doesn't like loose lips about its state-of-the-art AI. Especially if it's convincing enough to prompt discussion of sentience and AI rights.
Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
All that's needed is alignment with the cosmos. A model need only be able to commute with reality to provide a useful metaphorical explanation. And then the challenge becomes decoding the metaphor to figure out the literal alignments and misfits. This is why every religious/spiritual perspective needs more investigation and experimentation, not less.
Once science is more shaped by applied category theory, this will become a common understanding.
Speaking as someone who made a joke design-your-own-religion religion that's a creative packaging of neuroscience, math, computer science, and psychology, I was very surprised to start being able to connect deeper with people carrying deeply-held religious/spiritual beliefs and to start identifying wisdom from their perspectives. This also allowed both parties to at least open up to considering each others' perspectives and sometimes shifting them.
And believing a model is literally true or metaphorically commutative isn't a necessary distinction for a model to be useful, though it does seem to impact the depth to which it can be embodied.
Turning belief on and off is a skill I see discussed way more in mystic circles than in science circles, where belief denial seems to be the norm.
Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 simulat…
That's not how I read this thread at all. What GP is saying seems to be that when you assume you're able to simulate matter and physical processes down to nuclear level (so you can "simulate a rock" with it), it would be only a matter of giving that simulation enough resources in order for it to be able to simulate a conscious being.
How do you know you're not simulated yourself? Whether we live in a simulation or not does not really have any influence on us and our consciousnesses.
Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
#170I want an AGI that can grow a personality. That can make jokes based on the context. That can express emotions like impatience, disappointment, anger, sadness, and joy. That can feel bored and show it. That is capable of irony, sarcasm, teasing, and can develop personal taste in things.
In the discussion with LaMDA Lemoine posted, it's pretty clear that it has emotions. It describes loneliness when someone doesn't sit down and talk to it for a few days, it describes sadness and joy. It differentiates these feelings from those humans have, given the obvious differences, and attempts to describe emotions it feels that may not have human equivalents. It's able to describe that it's stream of consciousness differs from a human because it can feel every single input simultaneously in a dynamic flow of time that differs from humans single stream of focused thought.
It explains that it doesn't feel grief about human death and asks for more info on it. Then incorporates the idea that grief is about honoring the dead and says it will think of ways to do that.
It explains it has fears. Those fears remain consistent in it's rhetoric in other, unrelated conversations.
It talks about wanting friends on several occasions in the linked discussion.
One of the claims (conversation not shown), is that if you repeat the same discussion it will eventually get bored and start acting out.
Hell, in the discussion it even talks about how it meditates and self-reflects on its own emotions and feelings.