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

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#261

Post by ithkuil » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

whittingtonaaon wrote: post #213

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you agree with David Chalmers' insistence that consciousness can't be explained purely mechanistically. P-zombies are literally defined as externally identical to a conscious person, except not conscious. But the IO if you will is still identical. Chalmers uses this false dichotomy to support his "Hard Problem of Consciousness". But there is no hard problem IMO. Chalmers can keep his dualist baggage if it hel…

How can science, whose subject matter is the external world, explain the internal world of sentience? Not only has it contributed nothing to this question, it was also never supposed to.

Isn't that a bit extreme? Sure we don't have "the answer" but saying that the amount of things we know about how our brain works, from behavioral rhings how can our perception system can he tricked, biases in our cognition modes, the mechanism of memory and how it fails ... down to more low leven things about how the neuronal tissue works, neuroplasticity, the effects of brain injury on cognition (my favourite is when patients subjected to corpus callosotomy probably function as two independent brains and yet the individual cannot tell from inside, it doesn't "feel" like two people).

There is tons and tons of research. As with all of science there is tons of crap among the good work. As with all of science, it requires a lot of work to understand the state of the art and build upon it.

Dismissing all of that says more about you than about our scientific understanding. Yes, we humans do prefer simple explanation that fit in our heads and that are easier to achieve. That's why so many people find more compelling to believe in conspiracy theories of various kinds: they offer a clear cut, simple and total explaination instead of the messy and partial understanding of a real, ongoing rational and scientific enquiry.

After all We do prefer explainations that "make sense". On a first glance, what's wrong with that? Isn't science also trying to figure out what "makes sense"?

There are plenty of examples where our intuitions clash with reality and in some case we ended up accepting that (e.g. most people can accept that we're living on a giant sphere even if it doesn't feel so), in some other cases we kinda-sorta accept it (quantum physics) and it other cases we flat out refuse to (questions around consciousness)

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#262

Post by srvmshr » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

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…

I feel you took a dig at me :) And thats okay. Sentience fundamentally is ability to perceive emotions and understand mortal threat. I have joked about what exactly LaMDa or GPT-3 would try to do if I plugged the server off.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#263

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:22 AM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #223

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ult…

This was a helpful clarification, thanks. This paper is definitely on my reading list. Ahead of it for now is that book version of the Church-Turing hypothesis paper. I believe it's called The Annotated Turing. Supposed to be a great for self-learners like me who don't necessarily read a lot of science papers directly. Might pick it up tomorrow actually.

Turing was a remarkable person. So ahead of his time, sometimes I half-seriously wonder if he was a time traveller doing what he could with 40s and 50s technology...

And who else can put this on their resume?

PhD in mathematics

Revolutionised science and mathematics

War hero

Civil rights martyr

I'd hire that.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#264

Post by rictic » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:24 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…

On GPT-3's large number addition, a little prompt engineering goes a long ways. Separating large numbers into three digit chunks is helpful for its input encoding (https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#bpes), and giving it a few examples of other correct large sums will make the correct answer the most likely continuation of the input.

For example, I was able to get 2/3 nine digit sums correct (the third one was off by exactly 1000, which is interesting) by using this prompt:

    Here are some examples of adding large numbers:
      606 468 720 + 217 363 426 = 823 832 146
      930 867 960 + 477 524 122 = 1 408 392 082
      823 165 449 + 493 959 765 = 1 317 125 214

And then posing the actual problem as a new line formatted the same up to the equals.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#265

Post by simonh » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:26 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #215

whittingtonaaon wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are arguments to be made for both. Some crimes, even if virtual, can stain or corrupt the perpetrator in ways inimical to society. There are plenty of examples of people who fantasised or role played abhorrent behaviour and went on to perpetrate it in real life, so there is a real danger.

For example we tolerate computer games with virtual killing, but don’t tolerate virtual rape games. Even with virtual killing there are limits. Should we tolerate nazi death camp torturer simulation games?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#266

Post by gsatic » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:27 AM UTC

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)

This is partly the reason they fired him. There is no well defined scale of sentience. While trying to create that scale, using email/chat history of all Googlers they found Managers acting the most robotic and efficient while handling well known trained for situations, but totally unimaginative, bordering on mindless when handling untrained for situations. This put the managers at the bottom end of the sentience scale. As you can imagine, if you aren't a manager atleast, the study was shelved and the team reassigned to improving lock screen notifications or whatever. But as soon as Blake's post went viral people started asking what happened with the sentience scale work? Those conversations had to be stopped.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#267

Post by zach_garwood » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:29 AM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #240

zach_garwood wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm sure there are plenty of unflattering photos a journo could use against me, but in none of them would I be dressed and posed to look like a subnautical mortician.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#268

Post by soganess » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:30 AM UTC

whittingtonaaon wrote: post #213

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you agree with David Chalmers' insistence that consciousness can't be explained purely mechanistically. P-zombies are literally defined as externally identical to a conscious person, except not conscious. But the IO if you will is still identical. Chalmers uses this false dichotomy to support his "Hard Problem of Consciousness". But there is no hard problem IMO. Chalmers can keep his dualist baggage if it hel…

How can science, whose subject matter is the external world, explain the internal world of sentience? Not only has it contributed nothing to this question, it was also never supposed to.

This is akin to a Greek of 5th bce asking Leucippus and Democritus how we could know the structure of a world we cannot see.

The absence of an answer is not proof of nonexistence or impossibility. It is just neutral absence. Absence as evidence is only """ valid""" when all possibilities are exhausted in a definite way. Outside of math, that threshold is exceedingly rare in problems of even moderate difficulty.

Moreover, this style of inquiry can easily be turned on its head and used to (apparently) redress the interlocutor... Neither are worthwhile endeavors.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#269

Post by justapassenger » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:31 AM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #230

justapassenger wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you don’t understand why claims about sentinel AI are extraordinary then there’s really no point in discussing it.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#270

Post by whimsicalism » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

zach_garwood wrote: post #267

whimsicalism wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm sure there are plenty of unflattering photos a journo could use against me, but in none of them would I be dressed and posed to look like a subnautical mortician.

I've also now seen that he is actually using this photo as his twitter profile photo.