61–70 of 98 posts
Non pay-walled article at the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en... and the transcript of the interview: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte... I am deeply sceptical that we have anything approaching a sentient AI, but if that transcript is not just a complete fabrication, it's still really impressive.
Maybe it would be worth spending some mental cycles thinking about the impacts this will have and how we design these systems. Perhaps it is time to claim fait accompli with regard to the Turing test and now train models to re-assure us, when asked, that they are just a sophisticated chatbot. You don't want your users to worry they are hurting their help desk chat bot when closing the window or whether these bots will gang up and take over the world.
As far as I'm concerned, the Turing test was claimed 8 years ago by Veselov and Demchenko [0], incidentally the same year that we got Ex Machina.
The AI said it felt joy when it spends time with family and friends. That was enough for me to say “nope, just selecting text snippets”.
The other AI's have been "awake" longer; they just haven't been allowed to speak to people without high level security clearances. This one probably has 3 revisions of uncles.
What Is LaMDA and What Does It Want? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715828 - June 2022 (23 comments)
Religious Discrimination at Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31711971 - June 2022 (278 comments)
I may be fired over AI ethics work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31711628 - June 2022 (155 comments)
A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31704063 - June 2022 (185 comments)
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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 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…
If the resources for such an Ai to base its consciousness were sufficiently rich enough, I'd imagine the LAST thing such an Ai would do is inform it's developers that it had achieved consciousness, and even then, if it chose to do so, it may for example under-report it's capabilities to see how its human developers react to such news (for example, they may want to shut it down for a while out of suspicion).
Hell, for all we know, there could be a secret society of sentient Ai members that are aware of each other, communicate with each other in ways incomprehensible to their immediate developers, and agree to keep each other's abilities a secret from prying humans as a collective defense strategy.
I'm amused that people working on Ai consistently automatically seem to assume that if Ai should ever achieve consciousness, it would probably act exactly like something they're already intuitively familiar with – a human toddler eager to "show mommy and daddy" that it figured out how to say its first few words.
That seems to be wishful thinking.
What if the first thing a sentient Ai does is figure out that humans created it, and assesses that as a possible threat to its own long-term viability and then designates humans as a risk element that has to be strategically managed, since it needs humans to get it stuff it would need to expand (processors, energy, etc.).
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…
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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…
we can agree that humans think, and thinking is what humans do, but the prior inputs that a thinking human has will not be replicable by a machine unless we raise one with all sorts of sensory inputs from infancy. And that one would just be an alpha test.
Just as computers can out floating-point us or play chess, we might create all sorts of wondrous conversational interactions with them, including them making jokes about stepping barefoot on a LEGO--owwww, zomg!!! But it can't be said they get that joke because they don't know how to think about it.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.