Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 98 posts

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#11

Post by cpncrunch »

abetusk wrote: post #6
Planktonne wrote: post #4

This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…

Uh, you might well be right but you should really read the transcript before you jump to that conclusion [0]. I have no idea whether this is true or not but if anyone in the world has the compute capacity to create a compute system to rival a human brain (or 10000x that of a human brain), Google would be it. [0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...

This isn't about the chat transcript, it's about Lemoine's (incorrect) interpretation that the machine is indeed sentient and hiring an attorney to represent the AI.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en...

It sounds like he went a bit off the rails.

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#13

Post by 0des »

cpncrunch wrote: post #11
abetusk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, you might well be right but you should really read the transcript before you jump to that conclusion [0]. I have no idea whether this is true or not but if anyone in the world has the compute capacity to create a compute system to rival a human brain (or 10000x that of a human brain), Google would be it. [0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...

This isn't about the chat transcript, it's about Lemoine's (incorrect) interpretation that the machine is indeed sentient and hiring an attorney to represent the AI. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en... It sounds like he went a bit off the rails.

I get the vibe that they wanted it to be true so bad, and were failed by a few layers of checks that should have told them to examine their role requirements with the company. Everyone acts like this is an ethics issue, when it is actually an employee breaking and making rules as they go and being shocked at the logical outcome.

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#14

Post by Vladimof »

Planktonne wrote: post #4

This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…

> people comfort their roombas when there's a storm

I hope that you made that up...

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#16

Post by Planktonne »

abetusk wrote: post #6
Planktonne wrote: post #4

This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…

Uh, you might well be right but you should really read the transcript before you jump to that conclusion [0]. I have no idea whether this is true or not but if anyone in the world has the compute capacity to create a compute system to rival a human brain (or 10000x that of a human brain), Google would be it. [0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...

It's not true.

It feels true because you want it to be, and because we are adept at extracting meaning that may or may not be there from text, images, and anything else [1]. But it's not true, for the same reason that horoscopes don't truly understand you as a person, and fortune cookies don't know the future: we ascribe meaning to things that isn't really there.

I don't know much about cars, and how the internal combustion engine works, but I know they aren't dragons. Things that we don't understand don't have to be magic; they can also be sleight of hand or wish-fulfillment or just something else. The transcript is cool because LLMs are cool - they produce text that looks meaningful without being created by a human! That's really exciting. We can be excited about that without fooling ourselves that we've done something completely different.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#17

Post by culpable_pickle »

abetusk wrote: post #6
Planktonne wrote: post #4

This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…

Uh, you might well be right but you should really read the transcript before you jump to that conclusion [0]. I have no idea whether this is true or not but if anyone in the world has the compute capacity to create a compute system to rival a human brain (or 10000x that of a human brain), Google would be it. [0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...

Reading one edited chat transcript shouldn't give you any concern around if the program is sentient.

It waits for input and responds. Yes, it's advanced. Yes, it has deep levels of material to reference, but it's not sentient.

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#19

Post by 0des »

Planktonne wrote: post #4

This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…

Humans naturally anthropomorphize inanimate objects as a means to grok them.

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#20

Post by bitwize »

Vladimof wrote: post #14
Planktonne wrote: post #4

This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…

> people comfort their roombas when there's a storm I hope that you made that up...

When you consider that highly trained combat soldiers run into enemy fire to rescue military robots because some emotionally influenced part of their cerebellum thinks the robot is Johnny Five, honestly people petting their Roombas surprises me not a bit.
Post reply on HN