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

Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 109 posts

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#51

Post by TremendousJudge »

wcoenen wrote: post #46
TremendousJudge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Chinese Room argument never made sense to me. By the same reasoning, humans could be considered "not sentient" because our behavior arises from the non-sentient interactions of individual neurons in our body.

I interpret that as a problem with the concept of "sentience" -- the closer you examine it, the more holes it has. I feel like I'm sentient, and so does mostly everybody else (I hear). But I have to take their word for it, because there's no way for them to prove it to me -- they could be like the Chinese room for all I know. Asking whether something is sentient starts looking a lot like asking if it "has a soul". It's unanswerable, and therefore, it's the wrong question to ask. Fun to discuss, sure, but I don't find it a useful way to model reality.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#52

Post by bioemerl »

radarsat1 wrote: post #45
bioemerl wrote: post #34

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…

Your definition of "sentience" appears to be "optimization". I'm not sure many philosophers will agree with you, but it's a valid stand-point I guess. But imho just defining things this way doesn't really add anything to the discussion, it just makes it about semantics. (Which I suppose in some sense the discussion is fundamentally about semantics, what does sentience even mean , but I think most people would agree t…

> Your definition of "sentience" appears to be "optimization"

My definition of sentience was given in my comment. It isn't optimization, it's:

* Self awareness. Some level of ability to understand what you are and how you work.

* Emergent emotion. Displays of things like fear and happiness.

It isn't semantics, it's real behavior. Being a self optimizer leads to those two things. Sentience isn't optimization, but to be able to self optimize leads to sentience.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#53

Post by danaris »

cameronh90 wrote: post #8

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 have a complete answer to that; however, I believe there are at least two bare-bones prerequisites to an AI being sentient and conscious as we understand the terms:

1. Continuity of input: The AI needs to be constantly "on", constantly receiving input of some sort, and constantly able to produce output, rather than being strictly limited to producing discrete responses to discrete stimuli.

2. Continuity of learning: In addition, the AI needs to be continually update its "mental model" of the world—in effect, constantly "learning" and re-training its neural network on the input it receives.

Now, these are not sufficient for an AI to be conscious by our understanding of consciousness. But I, personally, believe they are both necessary for it to be even worth starting to consider whether a given AI might be.

I also believe that unless we start in that direction extremely deliberately and with the intention of making something as human-like as possible, the first AIs that have some remote chance of being worthy of being considered "conscious" will not have a consciousness that we can easily recognize, because they will not be based in anything like the same kinds of fundamentals that we are...but that's likely a different discussion for a different day.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#54

Post by danaris »

mdrzn wrote: post #4

People believe in ghosts, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in gods, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in aliens, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in a conscious AI, and everybody loses their shit? People have attributed intelligence to imaginary friends since the birth of time, let them have fun in their make-believe world.

With the exception of gods, nothing else in that list besides AI implies any kind of specific action to be taken in the real world that affects people much beyond the ones holding the belief.

People who believe in conscious/sentient AI—and, more specifically, believe that some of our current AIs have these properties—consequently believe they have reason to call for changes to how we as a society treat AIs. Those changes are likely to vary—some may call for restricting or banning them entirely, while others call for giving them rights, depending on just what stories about AI they've bought into—but whatever their overall direction, if taken seriously, they would be likely to severely hamper our ability to continue to progress technologically using machine learning.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#56

Post by danaris »

dougSF70 wrote: post #44

In all examples of sentience the "sentient system" responds to a prompt. The response is generated from probabalistic model, these models have become incredibly sophisticated and nuanced in recent years. However, I have never seen an example where a supposed sentient system starts the conversation and prompts the researcher. That would make me believe sentience claims.

As long as all you mean here is "I press a button, and the system gives me a prompt/conversation-starter", and not "the system spontaneously, at a time of its own choosing, gives such a prompt", from my (admittedly limited) understanding of how these things work, that wouldn't be terribly difficult.

Spontaneity could even be fairly easily simulated by setting some kind of a background task to randomly choose times to generate such prompts.

Actual spontaneity implies a host of other things about a hypothetical AI—with the most obvious being some form of non-directed (or at least not fully directed—as opposed to a simple background task initiated by a human for a specific purpose) continuous processing.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#57

Post by jqpabc123 »

MrYellowP wrote: post #35
jqpabc123 wrote: post #29

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.

> AI really is a religion for some people. The lack of any basis in reality is no deterrence. Everything is more and more turning into religions for people. A lack of any basis in reality is, nowadays apparently, the norm for people in general. Boiled down, it's: "Everyone only ever has an opinion, so my opinion is always as valid as your opinion." They don't care about what's real, they care about being right. This…

A hammer really can drive it's own nails --- you just have to believe.

And if it can't --- well, it's all because not enough people believe.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#58

Post by tim333 »

tiborsaas wrote: post #10
mdrzn wrote: post #4

People believe in ghosts, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in gods, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in aliens, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in a conscious AI, and everybody loses their shit? People have attributed intelligence to imaginary friends since the birth of time, let them have fun in their make-believe world.

Ghosts, gods, aliens can be discarded with a very high probability that they don't exists, or we can say that nobody came up with evidence so far. Computers rule our world, their existence is not a question so people's reaction and interest is understandable. There are very real fears that AI could mass destroy jobs before we can fix our social systems and benefits, like universal basic income.

Belief in God remains quite common.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#59

Post by tim333 »

plutonorm wrote: post #12

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…

The Turing test was never about sentience. It is as wikipedia puts it a "test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human"

I think Turing would have sensibly recognised that sentience is a bit vaguely defined.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#60

Post by kthejoker2 »

wcoenen wrote: post #46
TremendousJudge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Chinese Room argument never made sense to me. By the same reasoning, humans could be considered "not sentient" because our behavior arises from the non-sentient interactions of individual neurons in our body.

The Chinese Room argument was literally an argument against mechanism / computationalism (ie that your mind is just a really complex neural network.)

So no, "by the same reasoning" humans cannot be considered non sentient.

In fact the original paper is not talking about sentience at all, but intelligence (these are different things.)

And the argument it isn't about declaring something sentient or non-sentient, it simply states that responding with expected outputs to a given input is not proof of sentience or intelligence.

It basically says you have to use some other method to determine if something is intelligent and has "understanding."

You should read up on this a lot more, it's fascinating, and you've got a very incorrect understanding of it.

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

Post reply on HN