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

51–60 of 98 posts

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

#51

Post by lurquer »

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…

Misplaced empathy was the theme of PKD’s “Balde Runner” (or “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”)

The book, that is… not the movie.

The moral error in the book was humans wrongly thinking machines were sentient.

The movie turned this theme in its head, where the moral error was humans failing to appreciate the machines were sentient.

Anyway, I always found the book’s theme was far more interesting.

Great harm can come from humans attributing sentience to an unthinking inanimate object. It’s human nature to fall into this odd quagmire, be it idolatry, omens, astrology, and even silicon sex dolls…

Creepy.

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

#52

Post by colanderman »

snowwrestler wrote: post #50
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 t…

Does consciousness imply free will? I don't see why it should.

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

#53

Post by str34m »

elif wrote: post #29
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…

Same. I wonder how many people give zero doubt to the sentience of their poodle that gets surprised by himself in the mirror but will not even give half a second to consider that a neural net capable of inferring insight from novel koans has self-awareness. I don't think the majority of commenters here even bothered to read the transcript that convinced the engineer before completely dismissing him as a lunatic. My b…

No post body was provided.

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

#55

Post by rssoconnor »

Planktonne wrote: post #21
Vladimof wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a reference to an internet-famous Tumblr post [1], but people do name their roombas and treat them like pets. Again, I don't think it's a bad thing - it's a side point, but our ability to make mental/emotional leaps is something I would not trade away, and I believe it enables a lot of innovation and art. But it's something we should watch out for, because that same tendency can make us trick ourselves; I think…

I named my Roomba Muffins after it "chewed up" the magazines in the bathroom.

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

#56

Post by Gigachad »

ajayyy wrote: post #31

These models are trained on lots and lots of science fiction stories, of course they know how to autocomplete questions about AI ethics in ominous ways

I think the more interesting point is that even if we dismiss this as not real AI because it isn’t that advanced yet, at what point would we have achieved real AI? How would we identify it and categorise basic language models from actual thinking?

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

#57

Post by Gigachad »

snowwrestler wrote: post #50
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 t…

How would you know it actually decided that vs the program just having a 10% change built in to ignore instructions?

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

#59

Post by jhanschoo »

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…

If you're exploring the relationship between sentience and soul to the extent that it relates to how we should treat such entities morally, here is my perspective.

We don't need AI to explore the limits of ethics and moral status; these liminal cases play out everyday already, but the common non-philosopher is blind to them. The case of how we should treat fetuses morally is perennial in US discourse, but one also considers high-functioning orang-utans and elephants; crows, octopuses, as well as mentally-slow humans, developmentally-challenged humans, severe autists, people with Alzheimer's, etc. Some of these entities are less neurologically divergent to the average public human than some others, but we still accord them more rights, and the threshold varies from person to person if you ask them to consider these liminal cases. I suppose my point is, we don't need to wait for an AGI to jolt us into contemplating the relationship of sentience to personhood and moral status, nor should one have high expectations of AGI advancements to make us contemplate it, since there are no lack of present-day examples already playing out around us.

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

#60

Post by foxes »

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…

Degenerated into waffle. There’s no reason to believe that humans are more than some chemistry running on squishy meat. It seems like it would be physically possible to emulate that with silicon and software. There’s are no concrete definitions of sentience, thinking, so I guess you can shift the goal post whenever you want.
Post reply on HN