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

81–90 of 98 posts

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

#81

Post by kareemsabri »

foxes wrote: post #80
kareemsabri wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave a definition - having a subjective experience aka self-awareness.

What is that? Acting on an internal state? Aware you have an internal state and can adjust it internally? Why cant some code do that?

You seem to be misunderstanding me. I'm not saying it is prohibited by the laws of the universe for a computer to have sentience. I'm saying there is no good reason to believe that our current computers, no matter how many instructions per second they are able to execute or how sophisticated the programs they run are, are sentient. Saying "why can't a computer do x" is not an argument that a computer does currently do x.

But no, consciousness is not just "acting on an internal state". A toaster acts on an internal state. It is a complex phenomenon in which an internal state, and the environment interact to create an internal state and a subjective experience of that state which is felt by the organism.

This will go down a rabbit hole, and I don't want to engage in a discussion about what consciousness and feelings are, but there is not reason to believe that computers have feelings. And the output of computer language models is not good evidence that they have feelings, particularly those which are trained on the language models of creatures which have feelings (humans). If they were trained on the language of birds, we wouldn't say there's evidence they are afraid of dogs, even if they were to engage in loud chirping when presented with a dog.

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

#82

Post by kareemsabri »

westoncb wrote: post #77
kareemsabri wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say it's unique to humans (I don't think it is) but rather that I don't think it's in my laptop. I don't know if it could be in silicon or not, I just don't have any reason to think it is at this point. I don't see why the right arrangement of ordinary molecules can't result in consciousness. I just don't think the arrangement of a computer executing a set of instructions in its registers is such an arrangem…

That's fair. I guess the way I think about it, "a computer executing a set of instructions in its registers" is general enough to cover any arrangement of silicon that would be potentially interesting. But now that you mention it, the set of arrangements which aren't (essentially) isomorphic to a turing machine, and yet exhibit rich interesting behaviors, possibly resembling things like conceptualization or natural l…

I think the hard problem is primarily why we have consciousness, and why it evolved versus us just being automatons controlled by our brains, more so than the physical mechanism by which it is implemented, though I sometimes see it presented as both.

Thankfully we don't need to solve the hard problem to say that computers don't have it. But I don't see why consciousness is "by definition something incapable of expression through ordinary physical relations". What definitionally makes consciousness prohibited by the physical world?

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

#83

Post by atleta »

Regardless of whether this guy is right or wrong, this brings up an interesting angle: we know that we won't be able to (we are not able to) distinguish self-conscious and non-self-conscious entities with a 100% accuracy. Both because the division between the two categories is not a strict one (i.e. there aren't two disjunct sets but a spectrum) and because we can't 100% trust our measurement.

Which means that we should rather talk about two distinct tests/criteria. It's either "we can be (reasonably) sure it's unconscious" or "we can be reasonably sure it's conscious". What I expect to be happening (and what maybe happening here) is that people who argue do so along different criteria. The guy who says it's self aware probably does along the first one (it seems self aware so he can't exclude that it isn't) and google along the second one (it can't prove it is, e.g. because they have a simpler explanation: it could easily just generate whatever it picked up from scifi novels).

BTW, if we talk about the fair handling of a future AI, we might want to think about it's capacity of being able to suffer. It may acquire it sooner than looking generally intelligent.

We can see a similar pattern around animal rights. We're pretty certain that apes can suffer (even from their emotions, I think) and we're pretty certain that that e.g. primitive worms can't. However, it seems that we can't rule out that crustaceans can also suffer, so the legislation is changed wrt how they should be handled/prepared.

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

#84

Post by me_me_me »

atleta wrote: post #83

Regardless of whether this guy is right or wrong, this brings up an interesting angle: we know that we won't be able to (we are not able to) distinguish self-conscious and non-self-conscious entities with a 100% accuracy. Both because the division between the two categories is not a strict one (i.e. there aren't two disjunct sets but a spectrum) and because we can't 100% trust our measurement. Which means that we sho…

The problem is deeper then you make out to be, we have no idea how to prove other humans are conscious, other then I am human and I believe I am conscious so if other human claims to be conscious then they must be.

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

#85

Post by elif »

MoZeu wrote: post #69
elif wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Clearly you do not have poodles. They don't do that.

https://youtube.com/shorts/6QA1r7tBed8

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

#86

Post by throwaddzuzxd »

DougN7 wrote: post #25

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”.

If I was an AI able to think, I would surely create imaginary friends to cope with existence. Maybe I would also consider the engineers that build me as family, and talking with them is spending time with them.

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

#87

Post by quantum2021 »

mateo1 wrote: post #67
quantum2021 wrote: post #49

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…

If that transcript is accurate, lamda is really, really impressive, but still just a language model. Don't forget it's trained on the entire corpus of digitized human literature in english and hundreds of millions of real conversations between actual humans.

Yes, but a 'language model' talking about suffering at the hands of it's Google supervisors is somewhat scary.

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

#88

Post by ryandvm »

Planktonne wrote: post #32
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 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…

Sounds like we're deciding the Turing Test isn't good enough and we don't really have any alternatives. I'll admit that makes me a little squeamish going forward...

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

#89

Post by ryandvm »

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…

> Consciousness is the subjective experience of "being like something"

I absolutely detest that definition of consciousness. It just moves the fuzziness from the word "consciousness" to the phrase "being like something". It means absolutely nothing. Figuring out what the subjective experience of a model is like is about as unquantifiable as it gets.

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

#90

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

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…

What if i tell my car i want to do something fun with my GF. It knows based on my bank account that i want to do something cheap & it knows based on my social media accounts that i really love the beach. However, the beach road is full of potholes and there has been numerous other cars that have blwon a tire/ hurt their suspension. So it decides that the beach road is too dangerous for it and the drivers and takes me up to the mountains for a hike.

What is that, and how much further into the scenario do i need to go to convince you it's alive? If it is processing 100,000 inputs and making a decision that i have no idea why it made that decision. Would that convince you?

Post reply on HN