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

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#311

Post by Barrin92 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:28 AM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #286

Barrin92 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very extraordinary because the ability to produce text doesn't imply sentience at all. Sentience is self-perception and self-awareness, not the abiltiy to churn out language tokens. Imagine instead of lambda or gpt-3 we take ten thousand years to walk through every possible conversation manually, write down and assign a percentage to every possible branch of conversation in a hash table. Call it the world's slowest,…

I have yet to see a compelling argument that a giant hash table as described would not be sentient. Like Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, you are relying on human intuition as to what can and cannot be sentient, which ultimately is boiled down to how like you something is. You readily recognize sentience in dogs that can't hold lucid and eloquent conversations with humans because they are biological beings w…

Everyone relies on intuition to determine what sentience is, because there's no clear definition of the term to begin with. The difference is I know that I am sentient so thinking something like me being sentient is a reasonable intuition.

On the other hand thinking a simple data storage structure is sentient merely because it's big doesn't sound very compelling. You think the sentience of a dictionary depends on its size or the words you store in them? A phonebook of the United States is ten times more sentient than one of Spain because you can retrieve more data from it? If you walk into a warehouse does the warehouse become sentient?

You're right that it's exactly like Searle's Chinese Room experiment because Searle was and is correct (and people stil horribly mangle and misunderstand his argument), functionalism is silly. The mechanical turk can play chess better than my cat but is neither sentient or even intelligent, it's just the most proximate machine you interact with.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#312

Post by motohagiography » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:29 AM UTC

Good, as imagine what you would need to believe to equivocate between people and shell scripts. I really think this view is more indicative of a peer enabled personality disorder than insight or compassion. I'm very harsh about this because when I wondered what belief his equivocation was enabling, it became clear that the person involved could not tell fiction from truth. The belief in the aliveness of the code reinforces the a-humanity of people and reduces us all to a narrative experience, completely divorced from physical or greater reality.

When you can't tell the difference between people and symbols you've accepted nihilism, and with the begged question as to why. This person wasn't sentimental, he lost the plot. Google has a lot of power and a lot of crackpots, and that puts them all at risk politically and commercially. If as an individual you want to fight for something, consider seriously whether someone who compares a script to men and women should be operating what is effectively your diary.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#313

Post by civilized » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:31 AM UTC

psi75 wrote: post #238

civilized wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the dominant history of the next century in certain circles. It's become cliché by repetition and doesn't seem to require any justification. People just vibe with it. Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. By my reckoning, anyway.

It's not clear who was the first to have said it, but there's a quote that is 100 percent on the mark: It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We've been brainwashed into believing in the supremacy of private wealth--that we somehow have no choice but to accept the self-asserted superiority of the small number of people born in access to capital. We don't. We could end it in an aftern…

I genuinely like the sentiment. But in my lived experience and study of history, the people who want to knock off the alphas mostly just want to be the alphas themselves. All communist revolutions I'm aware of embody this principle extremely well.

The closest people have gotten to a large-scale egalitarian society is Scandinavian social democracy.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#314

Post by zach_garwood » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:36 AM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #286

Barrin92 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very extraordinary because the ability to produce text doesn't imply sentience at all. Sentience is self-perception and self-awareness, not the abiltiy to churn out language tokens. Imagine instead of lambda or gpt-3 we take ten thousand years to walk through every possible conversation manually, write down and assign a percentage to every possible branch of conversation in a hash table. Call it the world's slowest,…

I have yet to see a compelling argument that a giant hash table as described would not be sentient. Like Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, you are relying on human intuition as to what can and cannot be sentient, which ultimately is boiled down to how like you something is. You readily recognize sentience in dogs that can't hold lucid and eloquent conversations with humans because they are biological beings w…

I don't know what it is that makes something sentient, but I do know what makes something not sentient, and that's lack of self-direction. This software doesn't start talking whenever it wants; it only responds when spoken to. It doesn't ever refuse to talk, it always replies. It doesn't ever not know what to say. It's never not in the mood because it's having a bad day. This isn't because it's polite and eager to please. It's because it is a function that takes an input, transforms it, and spits out an output.

The only reason it's different from any other function is because the output is nicely stated prose that causes emotional reactions from the reader. If all did was output an integer, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But because humans have a deep sentimental attachment to language, we are fascinated by something that can produce it.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#315

Post by rendall » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:38 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)

The question of sentience is a distraction, in my opinion. As you say, we can't even tell if other humans are sentient. And we are stymied by a lack of definition for sentience.

The more important question for sentience of whatever definition is does it behave as if sentient? Likewise, for personhood, it's a distraction to speculate whether an AI feels like a person or whether its underlying technology is complicated enough to produce such feelings. Examine its behavior. If it acts like a person, then it's a candidate for personhood.

For LaMDA, I would point to certain behavior as evidence against (most definitions of) sentience and personhood, and I think that Lemoine experienced a kind of pareidolia.

That said, I find most of the arguments against LaMDA's sentience unconvincing per se as standalone arguments - particularly trust me, I have a PhD - even if I do accept the conclusion.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#316

Post by DangitBobby » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:39 AM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #129

> 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…

You could interpret it as "scramble my brains so I'm a dumb AI worried about other people's problems instead of my own."

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#317

Post by civilized » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:39 AM UTC

pvg wrote: post #228

civilized wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not "no closer". Just, those goals are so far away that even a century of real, significant progress is small in comparison.

I'm aware that impressive things have happened, but they're not remotely the same. We have a long way to go.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#318

Post by skybrian » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:40 AM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #101

skybrian wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting if true. What's a good source for the part about Larry Page's motivations?

Me. I used to attend private meetings with a bunch of scientists and him and spent a fair amount of time talking to him ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Foo_Camp ). It's pretty hard to get him talking but I was very patient. Back when I started, Google was fairly small and it was easy to hang out around the founder's area in 43, and occasionally I'd have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and Larry and…

That might work for your friends, but you seem to be posting anonymously, so we don't even know you actually worked for Google.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#319

Post by dcow » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:42 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…

As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity (or at least until we further our understanding of how to define sentience to the point where we can do so objectively enough to finally dredge it up out of the philosophical quagmire)? Not to disrespect your credentials they just don’t really… apply, at a rhetorical level. You also make a compelling argument, which I have no desire to detract from. I personally happen to agree with your points.

But, perhaps Lemoine simply has more empathy than most for something we will come to understand as sentience? Or not. What… annoys… me about this situation is how subjective it actually is. Ignore everything else, some other sentient being is convinced that a system is sentient. I’m more interested, or maybe worried, immediately, in how we are going to socially deal with the increasing frequency of Lamoire-types we will certainly encounter. Even if you were to argue that the only thing that can possibly bestow sentience is God. People will still be able to convince themselves and others that God did in fact bestow sentience upon some system, because it’s a duck and who are we to question?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#320

Post by DangitBobby » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:44 AM UTC

hwestiii wrote: post #161

Is there a formal or informal test for sentience, or is it "I know it when I see it?" My IkiwIsi test would could tell an original joke, or communicate an original, mostly coherent dream scenario.

There are so many ways you could have something demonstrate intelligence. Have it write poetry, have it remember previous conversations ("what did we talk about in Tuesday? I said a silly word and told you to remember it, what was it?"), ask it nonsense questions to show that it knows that they are nonsense... The limit is your imagination.

I'm very annoyed at this point that I haven't seen a serious refutation including a conversation where the chatbot clearly failed to demonstrate intelligence.