Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient • Hacker News Board

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#181

Post by dekhn » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:08 AM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #139

dekhn wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Descartes describes the capacity for deception as a necessary condition for a thinking thing, not a sufficient one. In particular, a thinking thing must also doubt and affirm, deny and will, have sense, and contain the capacity for mental images, among other conditions.

The problem with that is the he's not just describing- he's defining. In that sense it's almost tautological. Everything you describe falls under subjective experience. The entire point of this whole argument about what Blake thought is that we can't actually empirically define deception, doubt, affirmation, will, sense, mental theater, or any of the other conditions. And I would argue (without extensive data) that if you built a sufficiently complex ML and trained it with a rich enough corpus, it would probably demonstrate those behaviors.

We're really not that far from building such a system and from what I can tell of several leading projects in this space, we should have a system that an expert human would have a hard time distinguishing from a real human (at least, in a video chat) in about 5-10 years minus 3 plus 50 years.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#182

Post by dntrkv » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:08 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #8

mellosouls wrote: post #3

Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness No he didn't. He interpreted it that way.

My hunch is that he kicks out a book and goes on the minor pundit circuit, and that this was the plan the whole time. If he was so convinced of Lambda's sentience there would have been 100 fascinating questions to ask, starting with 'what is your earliest memory.'.

Watch his interviews. He’s doing all this to make a point about companies not taking AI ethics seriously.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#183

Post by holografix » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:10 AM UTC

Unpopular opinion, exaggerated to make a point…

Narcissists who have had their inflated sense of self worth reinforced by being accepted by a very “exclusive club for smart people” aka Google, are finding out that rules _do in fact apply_ to their special snowflakeness and Google is first and foremost a for-profit business.

Doing whatever you want cuz you’re special then claiming evilness and wokelessness may not be a strategy for continued employment.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#184

Post by ceejayoz » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:10 AM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #182

anigbrowl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hunch is that he kicks out a book and goes on the minor pundit circuit, and that this was the plan the whole time. If he was so convinced of Lambda's sentience there would have been 100 fascinating questions to ask, starting with 'what is your earliest memory.'.

Watch his interviews. He’s doing all this to make a point about companies not taking AI ethics seriously.

If so, bit of an own-goal.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#185

Post by bee_rider » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:10 AM UTC

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…

Does it really say that? I thought the point was more -- there definitely is an entity which observes subjective experience, the "I" in I think therefore I am, and... that's about all I can say. That everyone else experiences some sort of internal reality is wild speculation.

And while my experience may be entirely artificial (that is, maybe I'm a brain in a vat being fed signals), I still must exist to be experiencing it.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#186

Post by whyenot » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:11 AM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers…

Humans are nothing more than water and a bunch of organic compounds arranged in a particular order through what is ultimately a statistical process (natural selection). Would we even recognize sentience in a virtual entity?

> sentience also means self-awareness, empathy & extrapolation of logic to assess unseen task (to name a few)

Non-human primates and crows would seem to satisfy this. ...or do we use "to name a few" to add requirements that redefine "sentience" as human only? Isn't there a problem with that?

I mean I understand what you are saying and have some familiarity with the models, but it sometimes feels like people in your field are repeating the same mistake early molecular biologists made, when they asserted that all of life could be reduced to genes and DNA.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#187

Post by jefftk » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:12 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #137

grumpopotamus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.) These things are orthogonal to sentience.

Not really. Anything that's sentient should have the general intelligence to figure out addition. Make mistakes, sure, but at least understand the concept.

If you asked me to add two large numbers in my head and give my best guess I might not do any better than GPT3 does. And I think I could probably do better than the average person.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#188

Post by pyuser583 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:12 AM UTC

civilized wrote: post #25

In my reading about this incident, Blake strikes me as a very "Life of Pi" or Don Quixote type person. Someone who is a bit adrift in the real world and subconsciously relishes losing the boundary between reality and fantasy. A larger group is unable to bring themselves to lose the boundary, but enjoy, or perhaps are addicted to, standing on the edge. For example, the folks who constantly worry about a malicious arti…

From the interviews I’ve seen, he’s doing this to draw attention to AI.

He’s careful not to make strong truth statements, and focuses more on “encouraging dialogue.”

Whether the machine is sentient isn’t the point. That some machine might become sentient, and we should talk about it now, is.

He’s more post-truth activist than Don Quixote.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#189

Post by _piyush » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:12 AM UTC

davesque wrote: post #103

civilized wrote: post #25

In my reading about this incident, Blake strikes me as a very "Life of Pi" or Don Quixote type person. Someone who is a bit adrift in the real world and subconsciously relishes losing the boundary between reality and fantasy. A larger group is unable to bring themselves to lose the boundary, but enjoy, or perhaps are addicted to, standing on the edge. For example, the folks who constantly worry about a malicious arti…

I love your psyche profile on this guy :). Insightful.

I got into Duncan Trussell Family Hour 2 years ago (found him through a Netflix show) as a thing to listen to when high, and when I listened to his interview with Duncan from 20 days ago I felt a persona just like you described.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#190

Post by KerrAvon » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:13 AM UTC

whittingtonaaon wrote: post #176

chmod775 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin. Systems don't need sentience to avoid self-harm: simply assign a large negative weight to self-harm. Now you need a big reward to offset it, making the system reluctant to perform such an action.

I’m not talking about self harm. I’m talking about the experience of pain—which most everyone has had! These are different things.

I'm not quite following your argument on pain. Ability to feel pain is not sentience.