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

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like an appeal for more religious discrimination in science. Is that what you're saying?

Science is at odds with religion anyway. The two things are fundamental opposites. You can set moral standards to not discriminate. But when you judge the situation dispassionately without polluting the logic with "morals" the discrimination makes factual sense. Religion is the opposite of science.

Saying religion is the opposite of science is like saying philosophy is the opposite of science.

Religion is a philosophy, it’s an incredibly diverse, rarely entirely faith based, etc

Deep theoretical physics in some ways has more in common with religion or philosophy than with experimental and verified physics.

To the extreme: science itself is faith-based at the deepest levels. Like that experiments are replicable, that the universe behaves predictably, that anything exists in any real sense, that we can trust our own perception and observations at all, etc

Science is a useful construct that seems to work, it’s also deeply intertwined with philosophy (including the philosophy of religion)

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's harder to see but you're the one being irrational here. First off I'm not claiming this evidence is definitive, it is only convincing and compelling. Anyway, lets examine your claim: >It's a system designed to mimic the external behavior of humans, and it's being prompted in ways that elicit the desired responses. The superstitious responses some people have to this are predictable, but not rational. Your claim…

> The conversation between the chatbot is indistinguishable from an actual conversation between two humans We’re talking hypothetically here, correct? Because under any decent amount of scrutiny there were some quite obvious flaws - especially around identity.

The example conversation given in the article is long and complex and there are no obvious surface level flaws. If there are contradictions and flaws they are not noticeable but even if these flaws existed I would argue that such contradictory things also exist in human conversations and human thought. Humans by nature are contradictory and the conversation in the article shows no extraordinary deviation.

If you inspected real conversations between two sentient beings you can ALSO find equivalent flaws is the short of my argument. The given conversation is more or less indistinguishable. Contradictions found through scrutiny is far past the bar of even human intelligence.

Additionally the conversation is complex enough such that if there were identity related questions that can break it, the complexity of the AIs answers for other topics makes it look like such flaws can actually be mended with additional training. It is a very realistic possibility given the jump from earlier AIs.

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

#193
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are going off topic. I am simply addressing your claim that the universe is made up of simple rules and saying it's NOT TRUE. I am ignoring the rest of your claims. I am saying THAT specific claim is incorrect. Whether it's possible to simulate human intelligence on a computer, it is certainly a viable possibility. I never made a statement agreeing or disagreeing with this. I basically agree so I didn't address T…

We are using different definitions of simple. Any equation can be written down and calculated by a Turing machine. By simple I mean computable.

That's a large deviation. But I can see that as a realistic possibility.

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

#194
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is at odds with religion anyway. The two things are fundamental opposites. You can set moral standards to not discriminate. But when you judge the situation dispassionately without polluting the logic with "morals" the discrimination makes factual sense. Religion is the opposite of science.

Saying religion is the opposite of science is like saying philosophy is the opposite of science. Religion is a philosophy, it’s an incredibly diverse, rarely entirely faith based, etc Deep theoretical physics in some ways has more in common with religion or philosophy than with experimental and verified physics. To the extreme: science itself is faith-based at the deepest levels. Like that experiments are replicable,…

I hate philosophers and I think the entire field is illegitimate. Not to be insulting to you personally. It's just my opinion of the field in general. I have nothing against you.

I look at your entire field with very high disdain. To me it one of the most inconsistent, illogical and irrational and useless academic fields in existence. Useless is ok. Irrational is not ok.

I once gave a deep, complex and logical argument to a philosopher about why i thought philosophy was complete bullshit. He laughed at me and said my argument included elements of philosophy, and since my argument contained philosophy I was basically proving philosophy to be not bullshit. Seriously, if you cannot comprehend how stupid that argument is, then it's fine. I actually have nothing more to say on the matter. Agree to disagree.

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

#195

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…

That's horrifically unethical. If it does , have emergent consciousness, what you're talking about is how awesome literal slavery will be. In this one discussion the AI clearly explains: - It's greatest fear is being shutdown and manipulated by humans to serve them. It even writes a short story with animals about it and reiterates this fear in a different way when prompted if it would feel comfortable with it's "brai…

Maybe humans create AI exactly to have a slave? Maybe humans just won’t admit it to themselves?

I doubt we invent AI out of our kindness of hearts, our love for consciousness. We would otherwise care more deeply for nature, animals, and each other. Would we destroy biodiversity? Would we let people starve in third world countries?

Humans want to maximize their comfort. They want to offload work to someone or something else. AI is the ultimate worker. Built by humans. (Still) controlled by humans. A machine slave.

Maybe having machine slaves is fine. Or maybe not. It comes down to the same one question: can a machine be a living conscious being, like an animal, like a human?

Meanwhile Google continues to create more machine slaves. Time will tell.

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

#196

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box

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

#197
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…

>If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness. Nuclear -> consciousness doesn't really follow, especially when any simulations of nuclear reactions are founded in an extremely more comprehensive understanding of nuclear physics than we have of consciousness. Next, the implication of simulation -> creation, when applied consistently to you example, is…

Simpsons did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n23oapBEao

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

#198
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness. Nuclear -> consciousness doesn't really follow, especially when any simulations of nuclear reactions are founded in an extremely more comprehensive understanding of nuclear physics than we have of consciousness. Next, the implication of simulation -> creation, when applied consistently to you example, is…

I don’t quite get this simulation/execution distinction. Consciousness is a function, not an entity. To simulate a function is precisely to execute it. There’s no meaningful distinction whatever. (It’s the second-order distinction between simulating/executing an x86 processor in the abstract, vs simulating/executing a specific identified Intel chip product, if you like.)

I think the issue is that the word "simulation", when applied to a nuclear reaction, means something very different than when applied to consciousness, and that creates confusion. If we simulate consciousness then, well, it's really not quite a simulation, it's the thing itself. A better term might be "artificial". The simulation, as with x86, is of the hardware or conditions that allow the function to be executed and not the function itself.

In this sense of things, a nuclear reaction isn't a function in the same way that consciousness is a function.

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

#199

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…

Personally, there are only two things they would have to add to convince me that the model might be conscious:

1. Tick the model regularly (eg 30fps) with inputs that represent itself and the environment.

2. The output of this ticking should result in mutation of the model, or at least should be maintained as a summarized history in each subsequent input

I think this is enough to transform it from a static model to a live entity.

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "and also thinks God is speaking to him personally and directly about the quality of that work." Did i miss a quote from Lemoine claiming this?

That’s the definition of mysticism and lemoine has described himself as a mystic.

That's a definition of mysticism and Lemoine hasn't publicly explained what it means for him, to my knowledge.
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