251–260 of 749 posts
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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?
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)
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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 w…
But science has never said anything about it at all. The subject matter of science is the externally observable and consciousness is an internal category.
> 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…
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 fe…
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The only physical evidence is found in behavior and facial expressions. But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin. Much if not all of morality also depends on our belief in or knowledge of sentience. Sentience is why torture, rape and murder are wrong.
Then is torture, rape and murder wrong because the victim is sentient, or because the perpetrator is?
Nothing is wrong unless it's done by a moral actor (which is a much higher standard than sentience. Pretty much everything with a central nervous system is sentient, but lobsters, for instance, are not moral actors.
Similarly, the usual understanding of the moral status (the gravity of not the binary permissible/wrong status) of the three acts you describe is somewhat connected to the target as well as the actor being a moral actor (that's least the case with torture, and most the case with murder) rather than merely sentient.
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…
Like, 6.
It's just amusing how old this example is.
The Mechanical Turk was much much older - but easily shown to be a person hiding in the mechanism. I think ELIZA was in some sense a mirror, reflecting back consciousness, and that's the feeling we get from these systems.
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Then is torture, rape and murder wrong because the victim is sentient, or because the perpetrator is?
Because the victim is, of course.
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As someone who wears tshirt and jeans every day, I'm not exactly qualified to comment on others' fashion choices. But if I wanted people to take me seriously, that wouldn't be my first choice of outfit.
e: Keeping below comment for posterity, but given that this is his official twitter profile photo I'm going to retract it. > But if I wanted people to take me seriously, that wouldn't be my first choice of outfit. You would wear the most serious outfits at all time so no publication can ever take a picture of you to make fun of you? Sounds exhausting. But let's be clear - it's not like he picked out this photo to be…
I think this outcome is unsurprising. While I believe Blake was mistaken in his belief, I also think we should have stronger whistleblower laws that protect people who raise concerns like these. I'm not sure what process I'd put into place but it does feel like one is needed.
This isn't whistleblowing. It's blowing his own horn to make himself the Flavor of the Week (if that's not a mixed metaphor).