41–50 of 109 posts
AI really is a religion for some people. The lack of any basis in reality is no deterrence. Google engineer Blake Lemoine wrote that his statements are rooted in his convictions as a priest. All the math, logic and programming experience in the world is immediately discarded in favor of the fantasy they desperately wish to be true --- that a binary logic playback device can write it's own script.
I don't think LaMDA (or any other AI) is conscious or sentient. However, how will we be able to recognise it when we do create something that could be considered sentient? It seems inevitable that we will at some point. Many of the arguments used to suggest AI isn't sentient seem reductive, for example saying it's just a complex algorithm or statistical system. You could similarly say human brains are just a bunch of…
I don't think LaMDA (or any other AI) is conscious or sentient. However, how will we be able to recognise it when we do create something that could be considered sentient? It seems inevitable that we will at some point. Many of the arguments used to suggest AI isn't sentient seem reductive, for example saying it's just a complex algorithm or statistical system. You could similarly say human brains are just a bunch of…
It's a problem of false dichotomy. Sentience isn't a light switch. It's grains of rice that accumulate into a meaningful mass. This is also the reason the abortion debate will never be resolved. We can expect similar passion ex uncertainty from the future machine sentience debate.
Suppose we could temporarily reduce these grains into something very small. For example, putting a human into deep anesthesia. Is it immoral to destroy their body at that point in time since they are less sentient than an insect?
Or do we consider their potential for sentience, as they can hypothetically be removed from the state of anesthesia in the future?
This is a copy paste, but I want to bring it up every stupid time someone mentions this topic of AI sentience. I actually think that sentient AI are all over the place already. Every single learning machine is sentient. That learning bit is very important. The "AI" you interact with every day do not actually learn. They are trained in some big server room with billions of GPUs, then the learning part is turned off an…
(Which I suppose in some sense the discussion is fundamentally about semantics, what does sentience even mean, but I think most people would agree that it refers to something a little beyond your definition here. Redefining it away does not solve the issue.)
I don't think LaMDA (or any other AI) is conscious or sentient. However, how will we be able to recognise it when we do create something that could be considered sentient? It seems inevitable that we will at some point. Many of the arguments used to suggest AI isn't sentient seem reductive, for example saying it's just a complex algorithm or statistical system. You could similarly say human brains are just a bunch of…
I'm of the view that asking whether something is sentient or not is asking the wrong question. Once you believe an entity is (or isn't) sentient, it's an unfalsifiable belief. Thought experiments like the Turing test and the Chinese Room point to the fact that something could be "not sentient" and behave in the exact same way as something that is "sentient". What's the use of talking about sentience then, if we're un…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It seems inevitable that we will at some point. We have no idea what causes consciousness. The only thing I'm sure about is that I'm conscious. Are all the other people conscious? I strongly believe so, but I don't have a proof. Are all the animals conscious? I think that they are, to different degrees. Would a simulation of full human brain on a computer be conscious? Uhh, I guess so? Would the same simulation, but…
Haha, this is a great way to summarize the state of our understanding on consciousness > The only thing I'm sure about is that I'm conscious. A lot of people deny that consciousness exists at all, which I find funny, because for me it’s the only thing that I am absolutely certain exists. Everything else, I’m not so sure about.
The Turing test was the gold standard. Now that we are approaching success on the turing test... It suddenly becomes "believing in ghosts" to believe in AI sentience. The global conversation on this is mired in EGO and bad logic and terrible philosophy. You guys have no idea what consciousness is, yet attribute it to this or that with absolute certainty, born purely out of emotional reaction. We simply cannot know wh…
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London 1864)
It's even one of the things programmers really like about Rust. If you write a program that can't possibly be correct Rust but it is obvious what it should do, the diagnostics often tell you how to write that as Rust or point you in the right direction. e.g. I just tried to write a printf-style format in Rust's println! macro and while rejecting this as incorrect the compiler said:
help: format specifiers use curly braces
and
note: printf formatting not supported; see the documentation for `std::fmt`
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London 1864)
That's what people want the machine to do. Ask Google right now for information about the movie "Pirates of the Pacific" starring "Joni Dep". It does not, in fact, tell you that there's no such movie. Instead it tells you stuff about the Pirates of the Carribean movies, and Johnny Depp. It's even one of the things programmers really like about Rust. If you write a program that can't possibly be correct Rust but it is…