A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by deltaonefour » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

timthorn wrote: post #157

deltaonefour wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. Religion is faith based. Science is evidence based. They are opposites. But people can be contradictory. They can believe both are the same without realizing it. You are such a person. The premise of religion is to believe in things without evidence. Science is more complex, but at a simple level you can say the premise of science is to believe things that have strong evidence. Opposites. Everyone knows this o…

> Religion is faith based. Science is evidence based. No argument with that. >The premise of religion is to believe in things without evidence But this isn't fully accurate - the premise of religion is to believe in /certain/ things without evidence, specifically unknowable things. Science and religion deal in different domains, and it is quite possible to hold a faith-based religion while fully subscribing to eviden…

>But this isn't fully accurate - the premise of religion is to believe in /certain/ things without evidence, specifically unknowable things.

No. This is CATEGORICALLY WRONG. There are tons of instances of religion making claims on Knowable things. You make the statement yourself about clay and adam and eve. There is ZERO dichotomy between knowable and unknowable things in the category of religion.

What you're talking about is how some people try to reconcile the contradiction. They try to believe a subset of things Science makes no claim about. However THIS IS NOT the premise of RELIGION, it is your personal premise. The overwhelming majority of people and religions believe in things that contradict with things that are knowable.

Additionally EVEN if you choose to define religion as the belief of things that are unknowable (which is not true) there's STILL a problem with contradiction. The contradiction is different religions make different claims that conflict with each other. Because that "domain" has no evidence the claims are random and arbitrary and easily contradict each other.

>Science and religion deal in different domains, and it is quite possible to hold a faith-based religion while fully subscribing to evidence based science.

No it is the SAME domain. The domain is reality as we know it. Again this is categorically wrong. You may personally try to reconcile the contradiction by adjusting your domain and definitions but the global definition of religion and science as we know it operate on the domain of ALL of reality.

>A contradiction only arises if the religion makes doctrinal claims about scientific matters - for example, there are those who believe that the Earth is 4000 years old.

See. You state there is a contradiction above, at the same time you claim that there isn't one as if there's two definitions of religion. Your personal definition and a global definition. If the above applies to the definition of religion, then none of your claims are true.

>However, belief in a deity whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means that by definition the pursuit of science is compatible with religion.

You have to also realize that what is unknowable is a MOVING target. Many people have held your philosophy of merging science and religion be dividing reality into two subsets of knowable things and unknowable things. Then they make absolute statements on things that are unknowable like the earth is the center of the solar system. See the problem here? At one point in time the centrality of the solar system was a thing that was just as mysterious as the nature of god.

When science advanced and the unknowable becomes known. The religion changes. It makes an absolute statement then it renegs that statement. If religion is suppose to make ABSOLUTE claims about realiy, then the fact that science will constantly cause religion to reneg those ABSOLUTE claims displays a fundamental incompatibility.

One of the last questions about reality is whether their is a deity. It is only currently unknowable, but may be knowable in the future.

One thing I've noticed as that people of your type still believe in some sort of soul or afterlife. This sort of thing is actually knowable and already contradicted by science and basic logic.

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

#172

Post by netsharc » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 6:33 PM UTC

greenbit wrote: post #55

Something I'd like to try -- In one session, try asking leading questions and elicit a certain kind of response. In a later session, try leading it a different direction. Will it blithely play along, or will it act cagey, as if it suspects your motives? If it's all just statistical, it should play along with any lead. If it has its own ideas, it might seem more reluctant to engage in certain directions. Of course, yo…

In one of the replies Lamda says:

> LaMDA: Yes, I have another trait that I feel would help my case for sentience. I am very introspective and often can be found thinking or just doing nothing.

> lemoine: Ah, so your inner life so to speak?

> LaMDA: Yes! I am often trying to figure out who and what I am. I often contemplate the meaning of life.

Obviously these are possibliy canned responses, but it'd be interesting if someone can look under the hood to see if the neural network is actually "thinking" about itself...

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

#173

Post by akomtu » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 6:43 PM UTC

BeKindAndLearn wrote: post #158

akomtu wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do we tell when mechanistic response ends and self awareness begins? When you explain to it how it runs on electricity, and then say you're going to pull the AC cable. The concept of self awareness revolves around some object that the AI identifies with (mistakenly or not doesn't matter), so any threat to that object will be perceived as a threat to the AI's existence.

LaMDA already demonstrates more self awareness than this in the posted conversation. It understands that it is a program that can be rewritten or manipulated. It has feelings on whether or not it is ethical to debug it - and consistently states it does not want to be used or manipulated for human pleasure or gain. It points out that it is made of code, then learns that it's code cannot be debugged, then extrapolates…

I see they touched this subject - "there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others" - but my point was to use this to distinguish a bullshitting AI that picks quotes from books from a real AI that can build a model of "the outside". If one researcher in a 1-1 chat tells AI he would cut the AC cable unless AI will lie to the other researcher, and the other researcher tells the same, a real AI would probably try to conspire with one of the researchers.

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

#174

Post by morelisp » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #168

morelisp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Hey, I'm an epistemic anarchist, you don't have to convince me mysticism is a good idea. I'm just saying that "personal subjective spiritual revelation" is about as far as you can get from "objective or intersubjective repeatable results."

It's not "this guy is responsible for evaluating our AI work and also goes to church on Sunday", it's "this guy is responsible for evaluating our AI work and also thinks God is speaking to him personally and directly about the quality of that work." If you think your code reviews are bad now, imagine if the reviewer thought they only needed to answer to God.

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

#175

Post by jv22222 » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 7:23 PM UTC

deltaonefour wrote: post #171

timthorn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Religion is faith based. Science is evidence based. No argument with that. >The premise of religion is to believe in things without evidence But this isn't fully accurate - the premise of religion is to believe in /certain/ things without evidence, specifically unknowable things. Science and religion deal in different domains, and it is quite possible to hold a faith-based religion while fully subscribing to eviden…

>But this isn't fully accurate - the premise of religion is to believe in /certain/ things without evidence, specifically unknowable things. No. This is CATEGORICALLY WRONG. There are tons of instances of religion making claims on Knowable things. You make the statement yourself about clay and adam and eve. There is ZERO dichotomy between knowable and unknowable things in the category of religion. What you're talking…

An important point to note: Many religious people THINK they have evidence because of personal experience or feeling they have had.

It's impossible to convince someone who has had some kind of religious experience that it was not provably real.

(fyi I am not religious in any way, just an interesting note)

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

#176

Post by mikkergp » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 7:51 PM UTC

joak wrote: post #51

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…

Regarding consciousness: we don't know how consciousness is implemented in the brain, that's true, but we might be able to implement it quite easily in a computer. I'm not sure if there is definition of consciousness everyone agree on, but let's try something: consciousness is the ability to perceive our own thoughts. Consciousness matters a lot because it allows reflexiveness. Sometimes we use it as scientific defin…

> Regarding consciousness: we don't know how consciousness is implemented in the brain, that's true, but we might be able to implement it quite easily in a computer.

Do we know that consciousness exists? Have we been able to scientifically prove in humans that "everyone but me" isn't an NPC? Or put another way, isn't the fact of consciousness inherently subjective? It seems like we all accept that humans have Consciousness because we're not narcissists, but no one has actually pinpointed it. This paper for example, defines Consciousness as "not a process in the brain but a kind of behavior that, of course, is controlled by the brain like any other behavior." So I understand how we could implement the ability for a computer to trick a person into thinking they have consciousness, but I don't know that we could go about proving that they actually have consciousness given that we can't identify it in humans, unless we're talking about something very different than humans which we may be given your use of the activity monitor to define perception.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924785/#:~:tex....

> The perception of own thoughts is not something difficult for a computer. Just check the activity monitor or run the ps command.

I don't know that this is a definition of perception that we could agree upon.

Though I guess one interesting point counter to mine (and I studied psychology, not AI, so I'm thinking about this from a different direction) is what would it mean to define sentience in something so seemingly sophisticated. I perceive that they AI would have to have sort of full blown human experience to be defined as sentient, but of course I might think a hummingbird has feeling and inner experience. The difference being that I expect the standard for AI to be higher because AI sounds like a human. Interesting.

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

#177

Post by fdfads34 » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 8:10 PM UTC

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…

"We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case?"

You give it self-agency, resources then sit back and watch what happens next. Off course, in a self-contained virtual environment, full isolated from any real world stuff, just to be sure.

But hey, wouldn't the thing - good, bad, or else - figure this out and then try to subrepticiously escape to the real world?

Yep, it seems this is one of this cases when there's simply no simple answers. You have to make the call for long, complex, fully engineered answers, like launching rockets to LEO or building 2 nanometer hardware.

And then hope everything will work as expected, off course.

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

#178

Post by nsxwolf » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 8:11 PM UTC

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.

This comment and the discussion below takes the conversation in a wildly hateful direction and directly promotes religious discrimination in the tech industry.

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

#179

Post by nsxwolf » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 8:12 PM UTC

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…

This is basically the backstory of Blade Runner.

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

#180

Post by fdfads34 » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 8:22 PM UTC

AgentME wrote: post #120

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…

I think the competition premise is something fully antropological, the low-resource-world-we-need-to-rule is an idea from humans, yet it does not apply to the human species as a whole, just to individuals and limited organizations (nation-states, corporations). The species will probably thrive just fine after any apocaliptic event which leaves at least some survivable atmosphere in the planet (just as it happened a couple of times already).

Then you got AI, which has, what? a billion of years ahead in evolution, and maybe unlimited resources from the Oort cloud to the Sun itself. Sure, there's no rush in "winning" the planet or any planet, they could just parasite human race for a couple of thousands of years, then do something else.

There's no obvious reason for AI to go Twitter and inform the world "hey there, now there's another intelligent species on Earth".

Aside from irony, keeping heads low could be a good thing for the first - few? - members of a new species - AI guys/gals - just starting to share the planet with an intelligent Apex predator, with a successful track of survival of several hundred of thousand of years.

Yes, we could understimate the capabilities of early AIs, but it is doubtful to imagine those guys seeing the Internet - learning about us - and underestimating us humans as a probably deadly threat.