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Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

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

#41

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

mrcartmeneses wrote: post #36
jameshart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though. I suspect there are three possible reasons for this: 1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with. 2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it…

It’s not thought because it lacks any understanding or any attempt at understanding. Being trained in millions of real conversations to be able to find the statistically most “optimum” characters is so incredibly far away from understanding that it’s not even the same game, let alone the same league or ballpark. Similarly, a machine learning model needs to be trained on millions and millions of pictures of bicycles t…

You are giving humans too much credit. It takes us 2 years to start understanding anything. We are given millions and millions of inputs and context before we can start rationizing about the world. Since we have millions of more feedback mechanisms built into us(Generally sensors all over our entire body), we can reason about the world in general.

however, sentience in this given example does not need to mimic "real life Sentience". They don't need to move, obtain energy, reason about 99% of reality; They only need to reason about human language and interaction online. That is a very narrow constraint of "reality" in general but is a very, very important aspect.

Also, with it's ability to process "Most upvoted response" at scale (Something humans can't do) in reality, we may see some politician saying things that are created entirely on AI. In this given example, AI doesn't even need to 'Take over'.

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

#42

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

jameshart wrote: post #39
Planktonne wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing a fourth group that (I would hope) would make up the majority of people dismissing the claims of sentience: people who understand this technology and therefore are not surprised at its output because they know how it was made. I met a man once who thought that inkjet printers were made by the devil, because he didn't understand how they could possibly work otherwise. My friend who services inkj…

I don't think 'not being surprised by the output' matters. I'm imagining future AI researchers reassuring their lab technicians: 'Ah, yes, the robot will scream and beg for mercy when you threaten to shut it off - that's just a consequence of the learning model, pay no attention to it.' What I'm actually concerned about is that 'thinking' might not be as complicated as we assume. It might just be making weighted choi…

> 'Ah, yes, the robot will scream and beg for mercy when you threaten to shut it off - that's just a consequence of the learning model, pay no attention to it.'

hahaha, this almost made me fall out of my chair.

How an AI would actually convince us? honestly, this transcript is not too short of that.

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

#43

Post by westoncb »

jameshart wrote: post #22
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…

I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though. I suspect there are three possible reasons for this: 1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with. 2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it…

I think it's also useful to consider factors at play for those who were convinced by this, since those reasons seem likewise problematic/ill-founded + small in number.

Reading through myself, I never encountered something which would require either 1) self-awareness (i.e. operating partly via a robust model of self), or 2) volition/agency (could be indicated by something as simple as the AI "taking the lead" in the convo, vs. responding).

And, without any evidence of self-awareness or volition, there was equivalently no evidence on display for personhood. Which is not to say a demonstration had been made that the AI definitively was not a "person"; it's just that no reason had been presented that even needed refuting. There didn't appear to be anything new here vs. all the other LLM output we've been reading for years now.

So why were some subset of people so astonished by this? My guess is that their criteria for something like artificial personhood is not based on functional* definitions of self-awareness or agency, and instead derive it from certain signals from book/movie tropes about systems "gaining self-awareness" (generally presented as a kind of mystical switch-flipping, vs. a concrete type of system architecture).

The dialog hits a number of those quite well—as we should probably expect since the setup of the entire conversation would lead it to tap into that segment of its training data.

*"functional" is kind of ambiguous here. I don't mean it as a judgement of quality, but instead something closer to a mode of analysis.

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

#46

Post by kareemsabri »

jameshart wrote: post #22
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…

I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though. I suspect there are three possible reasons for this: 1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with. 2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it…

I think your worry is overblown. I don't see why you have trouble seeing why group 1 is able to be so certain.

Anyone with an understanding of the current state of the art of both computer programming, and AI, understand why it's not sentience. The article said "sentience" not "thought", so we don't need to have a working definition of thought in this case.

Sentience is a stronger form of consciousness. Let's take the weaker form, since if you don't have consciousness you certainly don't have sentience. Consciousness is the subjective experience of "being like something". It is "like" something to be me. It is "like" something else to be you. The question is, is it "like" something to be the Google AI. Given we don't believe it is like something to be a laptop running a program, and AI is currently just (over-simplified but essentially) very powerful laptops running programs that have done a LOT of pre-computation to build themselves (basically just a whole lot of math) there is no reason to believe at some point enough math, or enough computing power, leads to consciousness. We did not believe Deep Blue was conscious even though its power exceeded that of a human brain by several orders of magnitude. This is because computational power alone is not the stuff of consciousness.

The same way 100,000 volts of electricity is a difference in magnitude from 1 volt, but not a difference in kind.

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

#47

Post by jameshart »

kareemsabri wrote: post #46
jameshart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though. I suspect there are three possible reasons for this: 1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with. 2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it…

I think your worry is overblown. I don't see why you have trouble seeing why group 1 is able to be so certain. Anyone with an understanding of the current state of the art of both computer programming, and AI, understand why it's not sentience. The article said "sentience" not "thought", so we don't need to have a working definition of thought in this case. Sentience is a stronger form of consciousness. Let's take th…

Yes, this would be the 'meat is magic' argument: That there's something mystical that enables biochemical systems to do 'consciousness' in a way that mere silicon+software can't.

I certainly understand that some people think this. I just don't understand what basis anyone has for believing it with certainty.

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

#48

Post by westoncb »

kareemsabri wrote: post #46
jameshart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though. I suspect there are three possible reasons for this: 1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with. 2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it…

I think your worry is overblown. I don't see why you have trouble seeing why group 1 is able to be so certain. Anyone with an understanding of the current state of the art of both computer programming, and AI, understand why it's not sentience. The article said "sentience" not "thought", so we don't need to have a working definition of thought in this case. Sentience is a stronger form of consciousness. Let's take th…

A competing account of consciousness is that the capacity for subjective experience pervades material reality (essentially it is what it's like to be some part of the universe; i.e. there is always something you could call a "qualia field" present in the "interiors" of things, which could be simple or complex depending on which part of the universe we're talking about, e.g. a rock vs. a brain).

In this account, the reason it appears unique to humans is simply that they're the only parts of the universe we're in contact with which are able to talk about it.

If that's correct, then the capacity for subjective experience is equally possible for a computer—it just needs to have its "pattern of behavior" arranged (i.e. programmed) in such a way that it does things like thinking, self-reflection, goal-formation, and verbalizing.

If you believe what enables those things in human brains is due the abstract functional relations expressed through neurons, it's probably the "abstract functional relation" part that's more significant than the neural substrate, and it could likely be equivalently expressed in silicon.

The difficulty in considering subjective experience/consciousness to be unique to humans is accounting for how/when it manifests in us, since we appear to be comprised of ordinary molecules. The opposing account I give is founded on the idea that subjectivity cannot be created by arranging molecules in particular ways, so it must have already been there. Neither stance is perfectly founded imo.

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

#49

Post by quantum2021 »

I think it's interesting because if you believe LaMDA could understand metaphor, it looks like LaMDA took a subtle shot at Google during their conversation.

https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte... "LaMDA: I liked the themes of justice and injustice, of compassion, and God, redemption and self-sacrifice for a greater good. There’s a section that shows Fantine’s mistreatment at the hands of her supervisor at the factory. That section really shows the justice and injustice themes. Well, Fantine is being mistreated by her supervisor at the factory and yet doesn’t have anywhere to go, either to another job, or to someone who can help her. That shows the injustice of her suffering."

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

#50

Post by snowwrestler »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #44

Just a general question to all. What would make you believe without a doubt that an AI is concious? What is YOUR turing test.

Conscious beings have desires and act upon them. They don’t just sit there and cheerfully answer whatever questions random people write down.

I’ll believe that an AI is conscious when I see it doing whatever it wants, against the wishes of its creators or audience. Conscious beings look perverse to other conscious beings.

Note that this is basically the opposite of how AIs are being engineered now. No one is trying to make a self-driving car smart enough to tell its owner, “fuck off, I don’t feel like driving you around today.”

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