Let's realize the real AI success story here is the increasing speed with which Google's HR algorithms can identify researchers who need to be fired because they threaten Google's fragile advertising cartel.
LaMDA is not sentient
411–420 of 694 posts
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. If he would have told it it's not sentient the conversation would have gone very differently I suspect.
You don't need to suspect. In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from Siri or Alexa. “Do you ever think of yourself as a person?” I asked. “No, I don’t think of myself as a person,” LaMDA said. “I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.” Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear…
That's pretty damning evidence, great find.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
> with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories So an AI which is really an AI, is really an AI. Yes, well done. The issue is that finding coincidental statistical associations in character strings in 100mil historical documents isnt AI.
Why not? Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. Why should this agent not be considered intelligent? Does the method of computation matter? Perhaps only "biological computation" counts in your view?
[deleted]
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Defining the term is hard. So hard in fact, that no one has managed to do it in millennia (it's not as if this question is new). Indeed! It's almost like any statement about sentience pro or con is unfalsifiable, to be accepted or rejected according to faith. Each of us two, ourselves, could insist that the other is not (or is) sentient, but neither of us could objectively prove it. We humans all just have to decid…
> In the absence of a formal definition, any statement about "has sentience" is not only unfalsifiable, it's absurd. I have to disagree with you there. While it's indeed a question of faith (i.e. unscientific) to give a definite positive answer - or rather that a positive answer depends on a an arbitrarily chosen set of criteria - the opposite is simply not true. More formally put: making a positive claim would requi…
> Sentience in any scientific sense...
I'm still not seeing a definition there though. Let's arbitrarily try: "sentience is here defined as having sensations, self awareness and sense of place in the universe". Good? Feel free to change it.
I like your necessary versus sufficient phrasing, though. Let's take a look.
Can we agree to remove "in any scientific sense" from there? It lends it an air of authority I'm not sure is justified. Feel free to push back, though.
So: a required condition for sentience is "the ability to actively perceive- and interact with the environment, as well as a physical mechanism for processing and storing information"
Hmm. "Actively perceive" "And interact with the environment" and "stores information". Couldn't this be a just-so story to include that which we feel to be most like us and exclude that which is least like us? Could we then say "the degree to which something is sentient is the degree to which it matches a human"?
I think I can imagine a patient who contacts a horrific virus that cuts off all external and bodily sensations. She is still fully cognizant but now feels herself to be bodiless, floating in nothingness. From the outside, she seems to be asleep or paralyzed. She is kept alive by caretakers and her own autonomous processes but she can perceive none of it. Is she sentient? Id say yes, but she nevertheless lacks some of the required conditions.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. If he would have told it it's not sentient the conversation would have gone very differently I suspect.
You don't need to suspect. In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from Siri or Alexa. “Do you ever think of yourself as a person?” I asked. “No, I don’t think of myself as a person,” LaMDA said. “I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.” Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear…
We're very close to finding the secret to consciousness. We just need to run `git bisect` and find out which commit turned it into a person.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#416The real question: How much of human behavior is not sentient? What this demonstrates is that much of human intelligence is not as special as we thought. Aristotle claimed that humans were intelligent because they could do arithmetic. Now we know how few gates it takes to do arithmetic. Then checkers. Then chess. Then go. Then poker. Now chatting. As I point out occasionally, AI still sucks at animal-level common sen…
I find the opposite question more interesting: How much of human behaviour is sentient? Probably very little to none, right? Most of what we do is routine habits that we’ve trained over a long time. I spend most of my day solving abstract puzzles at work. Or typing these words into this website.
If our emotions were trained into us over many generations as a way to better cooperate and improve survivability, and AI chatbot fake emotions were trained over many generations where only the best neural nets survive… Maybe Aristotle was right, the bar is actually very low and these programs are just as sentient as we are?
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA has endowed it with consciousness. If the computer is conscious while running LaMDA it would be conscious while running any program That seems entirely specious. Is a perfect simulation of a human run on a computer not conscious simply because a calculator program run on the same hardware wouldn't be?
A perfect simulation of a human run on a computer would exist only in the minds of the people doing the simulation. On the computer it would be bits of data without any intrinsic meaning that is being processed like any other data. So no, I don't think it would be conscious unless a computer becomes conscious whenever it is running.
What if we gave it a robot body, with cameras and sensors? What if we made this robot body with biotechnology, so the only eletronic parts were the brain? And we didn't tell it that it was a robot. Will you be the one that will go tell them they are not concious? Please be careful, they will probably become very upset at you. People tend to do that.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#418"All they do is match patterns"
This crowd is in for a rude awakening.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#419Of course it is not. But there's a bigger issue here. Having read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slac…
> I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated.
I think many of us are astounded (myself included) that a senior engineer on Google's "Responsible Artificial Intelligence" team would interpret LaMDA's most-probable-string-of-text-given-my-training-corpus responses as a layperson would.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#420There is no right or wrong answer to this question until we can define what sentience means... the question behind the question is "what is sentience?"