Is there a formal or informal test for sentience, or is it "I know it when I see it?" My IkiwIsi test would could tell an original joke, or communicate an original, mostly coherent dream scenario.
Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
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Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#162Annual 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…
Why were GPUs banned in Google servers? Cost? Security?
Google acquired a company in 2007 which had expertise in multicore at the time multicore was really improving quickly. One of the acquired principal engineers wrote a manifesto saying that GPUs were a waste of time because they didn't solve problems like speeding up search (it's probably still around) or the other things Google was spending a lot of cycles on (ML training). It was a great example of a technical leader being completely wrong about one of the directions of the future and the technical solution to it. Now, I should say that multicore machines are still highly relevant and complement GPUs nicely- but the manifesto happened at a time to convince leadership to avoid making strategic deals with nvidia at a critical time.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it's not sentient, but why would commonplace logic be a pre requisite for sentience / consciousness / qualia / whatever you want to call it?
"Qualia" is mainly a term used by certain philosophers to insist on consciousness not being explainable by a mechanistic theory. It's not well-defined at all. And neither are "consciousness" and "sentience" anymore, much due to the same philosophers. So I no longer have any idea what to call any of these things. Thanks, philosophy. I like to think of consciousness as whatever process happens to integrate various disp…
We know regions associated with consciousness in the brain. A recent paper took that knowledge and did something kind of clever - they looked in species where that region was under development. Out of it came a lot of conjecture related to the region being used in the development of complex self-simulation motor control.
It struck me that the intelligence theories of reinforcement learning have been encountering this same paradigm of self-simulation being necessary. A Tesla for example when it has to go down a street that also has another car needs to do a rollout not just for itself but the other car in order to actuate such that it can move in this motor control task. Not being able to model both agents makes it really trick to do planning. These tree search married to modeling problems seems to show up all over the place in the top performing architectures.
For this reason I'm really suspect of the language model view of consciousness; it doesn't seem plausible. Or at least, I'm a little skeptical. In theory for a significantly large enough language model I don't see why you couldn't use a "loop unrolling" argument to posit that for some subset of the network there is an analogous computation to what my best guess about what consciousness is might look like. Worse for me is that when I strong man the argument I run into things like "the training task involves predicting the output of conscious entities and so a truly generalizing agent would be directed to learn just that unrolled loop". I'm not saying I think the language models are conscious, but I do see how reasonable people can arrive at those views.
We probably need to write down a very hard definition of consciousness even if its wrong - or use terms that are better defined - because the ambiguity in the realm of things we don't fully understand makes this an annoying "words" problem rather than a concrete "facts" problem.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#164Do people think he geuinely belives this AI is sentient, or he is pushing this narrative for some other purpose?
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#165Earlier 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?
Is that a necessary condition for sentience?
Look, nobody knows what makes a thing conscious or not, and anyone who claims they do with certainty is talking out of turn. Is this guy being a bit silly? Yeah, I think so. But let's not pretend that anyone on earth has suddenly answered a question that humanity has been thinking about without significant progress for thousands of years.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it's not sentient, but why would commonplace logic be a pre requisite for sentience / consciousness / qualia / whatever you want to call it?
"Qualia" is mainly a term used by certain philosophers to insist on consciousness not being explainable by a mechanistic theory. It's not well-defined at all. And neither are "consciousness" and "sentience" anymore, much due to the same philosophers. So I no longer have any idea what to call any of these things. Thanks, philosophy. I like to think of consciousness as whatever process happens to integrate various disp…
"Sentience I guess I would call awareness of self or something along those lines."
Is a self driving car aware of itself? Surely within its logic it represents itself as a vehicle, while also being able to logically represent other vehicles on the road. Its logic accounts for there being similarities (they both obey the same laws of physics and such) and differences (its logic controls its own behavior but not that of other vehicles). So it has a meaningful and useful concept of "self". All of this is required for it to be able to function.
What if some future iteration of a self driving car's vision system allows it to glean useful information from reflections, such as off of store windows? If it correctly can identify a reflection of itself as being itself... well then it has passed the mirror test. But that is a pretty silly thing to assign too much meaning to.
I just don't see "awareness of self" as being meaningful. It doesn't narrow down the definition at all.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#167The most amazing part of this story is that he decided to leak proprietary information for what seems to be no obvious return and future employment difficulty.
He had to have known that getting fired would be the outcome of publicly disclosing trade secrets.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
This isn't the gotcha you think it is.
Please enlighten us.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it's not sentient, but why would commonplace logic be a pre requisite for sentience / consciousness / qualia / whatever you want to call it?
"Qualia" is mainly a term used by certain philosophers to insist on consciousness not being explainable by a mechanistic theory. It's not well-defined at all. And neither are "consciousness" and "sentience" anymore, much due to the same philosophers. So I no longer have any idea what to call any of these things. Thanks, philosophy. I like to think of consciousness as whatever process happens to integrate various disp…
Philosophy is currently the only subject which can teach us about sentience (which I would define as the ability to experience.) This is because the subject matter of the sciences is the external world. During the scientific revolution, this limitation of science was, however, more generally and explicitly acknowledged than it is today, where there seems to be a lot of confusion about it. A good book on this stuff is Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.
I do agree that the terminology is unfortunately convoluted. The main term is “consciousness,” which does often seem unclear to me.
The basic mystery is just the ability to experience/feel, and is an undeniable part of life, for humans and at least some animals.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's malicious. I just think at some point he found that he wanted to believe, and it's hard to go back from there.
> I don't think it's malicious. Not yet it's not. It's when he realizes he can cash in on it that we'll see the inevitable book(s) and appearances on Coast to Coast / Alex Jones.
Philosophers are frequently pressed for cash, but usually not that pressed.