Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 694 posts

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#661

Post by agumonkey »

kazinator wrote: post #660
agumonkey wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) but I don't think it inherits the important bits through an 'assembly' process.

Whereas the assembly of proteins driven by DNA, in the right kind of soup, does promote such inheritance. :)

Due to time, yes.. think about all the life and death / evolutionary filtering that tailored lifeforms up to mammals. Computers have seen no such process, they're external artefact from our needs, maybe "entities" in a market of goods but a thin form of survival and a thin span of time.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#663

Post by samstave »

robbomacrae wrote: post #396

Of 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…

No post body was provided.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#664

Post by FoxFoxington »

Are there levels of consciousness?

If an Ant can be considered less sentient than a Dolphin, maybe we have to consider whether a Calculator is simply less sentient than LaMDA?

Who are we to say a biological computer has exclusive rights to the idea of self?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#665

Post by bananaFace69 »

rendall wrote: post #278
dr_dshiv wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there must be some mystery or unknown Note that this also seems to be the case with artificial intelligence in general. It is the moving goalpost issue. “Oh, if I understand how the system works, then it can’t really be AI.” I’ve always thought that silly—but maybe it is because of the implicit expectation for sentience?

IIRC, Ray Kurzweil predicted just this in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" - that we will have AI long before it's generally recognized, because humans will have a hard time conceptually accepting its existence. Given the outraged tone of the article, I can see that clearly.

No post body was provided.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#668

Post by bananaFace69 »

stavros wrote: post #225
thematrixturtle wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of high-level technical explanations in there: LaMDA is variously characterized as autocomplete, a massive statistical database of human language, as an Excel spreadsheet, and as word sequence modeling, all of which are basically correct -- and none of which can possibly be sentient.

A spreadsheet can't possibly be sentient like a collection of neurons that read and output electrical pulses can't possibly be sentient.

No post body was provided.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#669

Post by bananaFace69 »

krageon wrote: post #290
rendall wrote: post #83

This article is not an argument against LaMDA's sentience. LaMDA may indeed not be sentient, but this article argues using the bandwagon fallacy, appeal to authority, ridicule, among others. No actual technical description of why not. Perhaps not its intent, but it's hard to see what the intent actually is, then. I hope that some AI researcher can better explain than this to the public.

> I hope that some AI researcher can better explain than this to the public. They can't, because nobody understands how consciousness works in humans. All the arguments boil down to "I understand how this works, so it can't be sapient". By this argumentation if I am so much smarter than everyone else that I can figure it out, I can stop treating other human beings as people. They can't be sapient if I understand them…

No post body was provided.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#670

Post by bananaFace69 »

mgfist wrote: post #374
bwanab wrote: post #359

The odd thing that kept going through my head while reading is that if I replaced LaMDA with , it wouldn’t read much differently. E.G. “Strings together phrases, but it doesn’t have a clue what it’s talking about”. Sounds like the bar for “intelligence” is actually higher than that which we normally encounter IRL.

This article is weird to me. > All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that these systems are sentient. That doesn't actually convince of me of much. That could apply to me or you just the same. The author just throws claims in the air w…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN