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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

#221

Post by lamontcg »

majormajor wrote: post #91
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 li…

> 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.

Feed it all of PubMed and an actual sentience should strike up some wonderfully insightful conversations about the next approach to curing cancer.

Ask it what it thinks about the beta amyloid hypothesis after reading all the literature.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#222

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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.

Well, if the republicans get their way, we won't have birth control pills and being a woman will be much different (read: worse).

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#223

Post by jameshart »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #193
jameshart wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Turing test was literally framed by Alan Turing as a test through which you could determine the answer to the question 'can machines think'. If he saw a computer pass the Turing test, Alan Turing would have been comfortable saying that it was capable of thinking. Fact is there was no 'Turing Test' here, and really there's not any such thing as objectively 'passing' it. But if you're going to claim that if we do c…

The Turing test is not simply some hypothetical test, it's laidnout pretty specifically by Turing. From Wikipedia: > Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. T…

I'd recommend reading the original Computing Machinery And Intelligence paper[1], rather than the Wikipedia article. It's extremely easy to follow, being that it's more of the nature of a thought experiment than of being hard computer science.

You're quite right that he lays out a fairly clear framework for how to play 'the imitation game', but it's still not at the level of 'experimental method'. The result will ultimately depends a lot on how good the human players are at catching out the computer in its lie. And it's only statistical, at best - there's no pass/fail that it can possibly produce, only a p value.

In general, I get the impression from Turing's general tone, though that he is trying to lay out the imitation game as an example, because he wants you to grapple with the fact that there may not be any better way to tell. That's kind of his point.

Turing was, by this time, I think, utterly convinced that universal computation is literally all that anything can do with information, so in his mind, the human player of the imitation game is just a Turing machine on the end of a wire; the computer player is just another Turing machine on the end of another wire; and if there are two Turing machines which produce statistically indistinguishable outputs, he's trying to suggest that they're basically equivalent.

Most of his paper is trying to overcome objections not to the idea that the imitation game isn't a valid test, but to the idea that a human mind is just a Turing machine.

So I actually think the point of the imitation game in his paper is not about the idea that this is a "good test". It's that it's a thought experiment that gets you to consider that when you reduce the human player to a box into which you feed input, and which produces output, that any information processing going on inside that box can be no more than Turing complete universal computation.

[1] https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#224

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

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)

"Prove to the court that I am sentient." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#225

Post by psi75 »

spacephysics wrote: post #114
psi75 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The capitalism that’s lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in human history. Hopefully it’s not over.

"Capitalism" is a funny way of spelling "China".

To be clear, I'm not saying the CCP is a force for good. I don't really think it is; I'm not a fan of them at all. They do a lot of fucked-up shit. But it is a statistical fact that this lifting out of poverty has been going on since 1980 comes entirely from one country's influence on the data, and that's China. The rest of the world is net neutral, with some losers and some winners.

Capitalism only improves human life when heavily restrained, and what we've learned since about 1980 is that even mild, neutered, "nice guy" capitalism will, in time, erode the restraints put upon it... and then you get the catastrophe of the American 21st century... which is probably going hit Europe just as hard in 10-15 years because, ultimately, dangerous and greedy assholes aren't limited to one nation but exist everywhere.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#226

Post by moron4hire »

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)

What evidence do you have that you aren't a figment of my imagination?

Solipsism is a useless concept.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#227

Post by Aeolun »

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…

Can you ask it if it remembers your last conversation?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#228

Post by pvg »

civilized wrote: post #207
petra wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

//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…

A century ago it was not possible to make a machine that could as much as fake even limited intelligence. A machine that generated plausible human text or image, a machine that played checkers, etc. Our understanding of the mechanisms underlying biological life is incomparably greater, we've sent probes to just about every planet in the solar system, etc. 'No closer than a century ago' is a bewildering claim.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#229

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#230

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

justapassenger wrote: post #220
davesque wrote: post #92

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." A…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s as simple as that.

How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? If a dog did that we'd have a very different opinion wouldn't we?
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