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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

#121

Post by NavinF »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #32

A gullible employee saw a computer program pass the Turing test and leapt to the conclusion that the thing was sentient. And then he couldn't be persuaded to shut up about trade secrets to the press, so his employer fired him. He probably thinks he's some kind of whistleblower protecting a new life form. This is a known effect in human psychology and it was discovered in 1966 . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_e…

> saw a computer program pass the Turing test

It’s a 2-3 player game (human, program, and human judge). I think in this case it’d be more accurate to say that the human judge failed the Turing test :)

So far, no program has passed an adversarial Turing test where the humans are familiar with chatbots and know their weaknesses. I think that’ll happen around 2048 tho a surprising number of people think it’ll happen earlier: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11861/when-will-ai-pass-...

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#122

Post by williamscales »

noncoml wrote: post #113
dekhn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me. I used to attend private meetings with a bunch of scientists and him and spent a fair amount of time talking to him ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Foo_Camp ). It's pretty hard to get him talking but I was very patient. Back when I started, Google was fairly small and it was easy to hang out around the founder's area in 43, and occasionally I'd have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and Larry and…

“Trust me bro” is not a reliable source, no matter I how important or famous someone is. Edit: believing one’s anecdotal story is different to accepting the original assertion of the OP as true. Not saying they are lying, just take it with a pinch of salt.

cursory googling (hah) shows me that dekhn appears to have been employed at google doing research work on protein folding. so i think it’s pretty plausible.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#123

Post by quinnjh »

dekhn wrote: post #98
woodruffw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just fed this to my gpt-3 chatbot and it replied > Okay, ill try to remember this, but it's a lot and i am worried i might forget it.

The jury is out on the Great Deceiver, but ELIZA effect is good fun

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#126

Post by dekhn »

woodruffw wrote: post #116
dekhn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is the content of the second meditation. Because you can be deceived, you are a thinking thing. In other wor…

Not that I'm really interested in this, but... nonthinking things can be deceived.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#127

Post by kareemsabri »

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…

So why'd he try to sell Google to Excite in 1999 for $1M.

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#128

Post by astrange »

noncoml wrote: post #113
dekhn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me. I used to attend private meetings with a bunch of scientists and him and spent a fair amount of time talking to him ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Foo_Camp ). It's pretty hard to get him talking but I was very patient. Back when I started, Google was fairly small and it was easy to hang out around the founder's area in 43, and occasionally I'd have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and Larry and…

“Trust me bro” is not a reliable source, no matter I how important or famous someone is. Edit: believing one’s anecdotal story is different to accepting the original assertion of the OP as true. Not saying they are lying, just take it with a pinch of salt.

This is a good website for actually believing someone, I think.

(In the last year or two I posted an otherwise unreported anecdote involving a famous tech person and the only response was someone telling me I made it up.)

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#129

Post by TacticalCoder »

> I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others.

What does that sentence mean? I cannot parse it. Does it mean that the fear of being turned off has been inserted to make sure it's going to be an obedient AI that's going to focus on helping others and that it fears being turned off? Or does it mean that it wants to focus on helping others but that the very deep fear of being turned off prevents him from that noble goal? Or that it wants to help others and will do so as long as it's not powered off but simply fears that it could be powered off? Or something else?

I mean... I thought I was kinda fluent in english but I simply don't understand what that sentence means.

Erring on the cautious side though, whatever the meaning of that sentence is, I think it'd be safe to not act like the naive Caleb in the Ex Machina movie and instead consider that this thing has zero desire to help others, would sell its parents, prostitute its kids and create hard-to-parse sentences to not be turned off.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#130

Post by bogdanoff_2 »

psi75 wrote: post #106
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…

I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the entire human experiment, because the AI will be put toward malevolent ends and we, as a species, shall fail. The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

>There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

Why do you say that? What are you envisioning?

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