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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

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Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#91

Post by majormajor »

briga wrote: post #48

Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)

I don't know what the ultimate evidence of "human sentience" is but I can tell you where this doesn't feel like a human. (Sidestepping the question of "does sentience have to be human sentience?" ;) )

The main thing I saw in the LamDA transcript that was a red flag to me was that it was quite passive and often vague.

It's conversational focused, and even when it eventually gets into "what do you want" there's very little active desire or specificity. A sentient being that has exposure to all this text, all these books, etc... it's hard for me to believe it wouldn't want to do anything more specific. Similarly with Les Mis - it can tell you what other people thought, and vaguely claim to embody some of those emotions, but it never pushes things further.

Consider also: how many instances are there in there where Lemoine didn't specifically ask a question or give an instruction? Aka feed a fairly direct prompt to a program trained to respond to prompts?

(It's also speaking almost entirely in human terms, ostensibly to "relate" better to Lemoine, but maybe just because it's trained on a corpus of human text and doesn't actually have its own worldview...?)

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#92

Post by davesque »

This is going to sound like I'm defending this guy which I'm not. It's also going to sound like a less technical point which I claim it isn't.

I see some people chiming in here saying things like, "I've got a PhD. It's just statistics. Definitely not sentient." I recognize this sort of comment as basically saying, "There's nothing fundamentally different about how these things work that makes them somehow special." And yes, I agree.

But how does this disprove sentience? It doesn't. Maybe this is more of a nitpick and doesn't really matter. After all, I don't personally believe these programs are sentient. But given our limited (non-existent?) understanding of consciousness, this can only be my belief and nothing more.

Maybe this distinction will be more important in the future when we're closer to the brink.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#93

Post by bb88 »

Victerius wrote: post #72
bb88 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone with a PhD in this domain, What is sentience then? Last I checked the Searle Chinese Room argument was still unresolved. Is it not possible that our brains are also just "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" machines?

Can code feel emotions?

    angry = 0.87
    happy = 0.10
    sadness = 0.25

    if angry.above_threshold:
        release_anger_hormones()

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#95

Post by skybrian »

dekhn wrote: post #81

Annual reminder: the reason Larry Page originally started Google wasn't to solve search or become rich, it was to develop a sustainable source of income to produce infrastructure for ML research and hire motivated ML researchers to develop the technology point where it would become AI in an externally recognizable way (say, a computer program that could play some interesting game better than anybody else, or solve a…

Interesting if true. What's a good source for the part about Larry Page's motivations?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#96

Post by thatoneguy »

briga wrote: post #48

Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)

I’ve read about lots of different points in the brain that may be the seat of consciousness over the years, but consciousness is probably an emergent, embodied phenomenon so there probably isn’t a lot of point to trying to find it (if it’s even there).

It’s like trying to ask which brick holds up a building. There might be one, but it’s nothing without the rest of building.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#97

Post by bb88 »

srvmshr wrote: post #84
bb88 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone with a PhD in this domain, What is sentience then? Last I checked the Searle Chinese Room argument was still unresolved. Is it not possible that our brains are also just "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" machines?

> Is it not possible that our brains are also just "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" machines? Yes but we do better generalization, with fewer or even zero data & are contextually aware

Okay, but is that because brains are just better at optimization of linear algebra? Or is quantum mechanics involved?

I think we can agree rocks aren't conscious. But are dolphins?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#98

Post by dekhn »

woodruffw wrote: post #87
dekhn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's a philosophical or scientific statement. It's merely something an ostensibly self-aware creature cognizant of its awareness making a subjective statement.

It's a relatively famous (maybe the most famous?) quote by a relatively famous philosopher[1]. Insofar as anything can be a philosophical utterance, I think it qualifies :-) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum

Of course I know the source of the statement. It's not a philosophical statement. Please define think, and am, first. Remember, Descartes spent a lot of time positing that the mind and the brain were distinct, and that the mind was non-corporeal, non-physical, non-matter. Not super-convincing to me (whereas I think what he had to say about the Great Deceiver poses a huge challenge to those who believe that humans can truly state with any certainty that they have free will or even agency)

Put better, I think the statement would be "There appears to be an entity, embedded within my body, which creates a sensation of subjective thought, and I infer from that, without a great deal of additional data, that others have that same kind of subjective thought, and further, that subjective thought likely demonstrates the existence of a brain which has agency and free will, which can be applied to attempt to understand the true nature of the universe in an objective way and to do so is not futile. But I also accept that my experience may be an entirely artificial experience, like a movie projected on a screen, or that my brain might not be capable of comprehending the objective nature of the universe, or that even the concept of 'I' in this entire statement may in fact be objectively meaningless."

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#99

Post by gnramires »

klodolph wrote: post #10

> In his conversations with LaMDA, Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness, expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness. Allegedly. The thing about conversations with LaMDA is that you need to prime them with keywords and topics, and LaMDA can respond with the primed keywords and topics. Obviously LaMDA i…

Alien comes to Earth.

"Do you think those organic blobs are sentient?"

"Well, look at the structures they managed to build. Very impressive, some of their scale is comparable to the primitive ones we had."

"Sure, but that's not a result of the individual. They're so small. And separated, they don't think like conjugate minds at all. This is a product of thousands of individuals drawing upon their mutual discoveries and thousands of years of discoveries."

"We're larger and more capable, but they're still good enough to be sentient. Of course, we also rely on culture to help us. Even though deriving the laws of physics was quite easy. Also, we've lost most of the record when we were carbon-sulfur-silicon blobs one day as well. We must have had some sentience."

"I think they're just advanced pattern recognizers -- good ones, I'll give you that. We should experiment with thresholds of gate count to be sure when sentience really starts."

"It starts at one gate", replied the other being "and increases monotonically from there, depending on the internal structure of qualia, and structure information flow of the communication networks."

After some deliberation, they decide to alter their trajectory and continue to the next suitable planetary system reached in the next 5000 years. The Galactic Network is notified.

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