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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

#201

Post by Waterluvian »

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…

Isn’t this also wrong, though?

I mean in the sense that it’s impossible to demonstrate that anything is sentient.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#202

Post by whittingtonaaon »

KerrAvon wrote: post #190
whittingtonaaon wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” which is what my dictionary just told me. I think this category really is the most basic differentiating one. Higher level stuff like self awareness all depend on it. The most basic difference between a computer and a human (or even a dog…) is, in my opinion, the ability to feel.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#203

Post by YuriNiyazov »

gnramires wrote: post #99
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 a…

You basically copied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They're_Made_Out_of_Meat

Edit: here's the full text, for completeness https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#204

Post by woodruffw »

dekhn wrote: post #181
woodruffw wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Is Lemoine a Cartesian? I thought this conversation was about Descartes and whether his utterance was philosophical, not the held positions of Blake Lemoine.

I actually accept your claim: I genuinely believe that it's possible that we'll create something that's indistinguishable from a Cartesian agent. But I'm not a Cartesian; I put much stronger restrictions on agency than Descartes does.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#205

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

robbrown451 wrote: post #166
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 o…

I was a little sloppy in my formulation. A better way would be the ability to observe one's own thought processes and integrate them back into consciousness. Meta-cognition is a much better term, I think. It doesn't seem to me like cats for instance have this ability.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#206

Post by coffee_beqn »

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.'.

I can’t imagine the book and minor TV appearances circuit pays as well as Google. Unless you mean he’s doing it to be a minor annoying “celebrity” for a few minutes

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#207

Post by civilized »

petra wrote: post #195
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…

//life a century from now won't be that different A century ago, birth control pills didn't exist. Being a woman was very different.who knows what will happen in a century.

I don't want to downplay progress. Life is very different for many marginalized groups. It's very different for the kid who died of polio in 1918 but would have grown up to be a revolutionary scientist if born in this century. We could go on and on.

Still, we haven't uploaded ourselves into the matrix, we aren't out there colonizing the universe, we haven't unlocked immortality or eternal youth or other dimensions or artificial general intelligences. None of those radical possibilities that people like to dream about seem all that much closer to me than a century ago.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#208

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

Which I expected to be developed in a book and speaking tour. These philosophical questions aren't new, Hofstadter and Dennett were exploring them >30 years ago in The Mind's I and other writers had been toying with the ideas for decades before that.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#209

Post by cbreynoldson »

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…

This makes some spiritual assumptions about things that are currently unknown and debated by respected people in related fields - one being that"everything" (or not) is sentient/conscious.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#210

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

whittingtonaaon wrote: post #169
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Oh, I've tried very hard to understand the views of people like Chalmers, Nagel and Goff. My only take-away is that it's just gatekeeping because science has made more advances on these questions in a few centuries than philosophy has in milennia. They want there to be a hard problem, because then they can keep talking about ill-defined problems all day with no progress in sight, publishing papers. Just happy to be workin'
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