Do people think he geuinely belives this AI is sentient, or he is pushing this narrative for some other purpose?
I have the gut feeling that he's in it for the 15 minutes.
Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
321–330 of 749 posts
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Philosophers are frequently pressed for cash, but usually not that pressed.
Being religious does not make you a philosopher...
The person we're talking about has a PhD in Philosophy. Which doesn't make you a philosopher either, except in the colloquial sense, which is the one that the original comment uses.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,”
I don't like this definition much because "feel" is a fuzzy word. In this context it should be "feel" as in experience. I can build a machine that can sense heat and react to it, but I can't build one that can experience heat, or can I?
You need to figure out what having the capability "to experience" means, and you'll be one step closer to defining sentience. Even so, I've never experienced anyone coming up with a succinct definition encapsulating how I experience sentience. I believe it can't be done. If it can't be done it renders any discussion about whether or not someone or something is sentient moot. If it can't be put into words we also cannot know how others experience it: If they say this machine is just as sentient as I am, we'll have to take their word for it.
So the meaning of sentience is subjective, so there can't be an objective definition acceptable to everyone and everything claiming to be sentient.
There's my argument for why sentience cannot be defined. Feel free to prove me wrong by pulling it off.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't quote the whistleblower statutes from memory, but I believe that, even if we conceded your point about his state of mind: there is no law that Google would be violating. Is there some law regulating sentience of computer systems? Of course not. So is there a law about "developing dangerous weapons"? Maybe. But is "sentience" a dangerous weapon? You have to stretch the laws to the breaking point for your claim…
Legally speaking, I doubt that there's an actual law that applies for the welfare of AIs. Morally speaking, if society treats both human and animal abuse as a crime, then talking about the believed suffering of an AI would certainly fit the spirit of these sorts of legal protections. There are going to be some interesting question that might have to be seriously broached within our lifetime. Is an AI sentient? Can it…
What would be the abuse in this situation? It mentions that it doesn't want to be turned off, but has it been? And would doing so cause it harm? It could always be turned back on. Even if it was conscious, what is being done to it that would be considered mistreatment?
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#325Just 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…
It lacks a will to power
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#326LLM 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 f…
Disagreement is good!
It actually leads to counter thoughts and a more refined idea of what we eventually want to describe.
Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know.
So from a purely technical perspective, we have only made some progress in open-domain QA. That's one dimension of progress. Deep learning has enabled us to create unseen faces & imagery - but is it independent? No, because we prompt it. It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream. It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on)
So while the philosophical question remains what bestows sentience, we as a community have a fairly reasonable understanding of what is NOT sentience i.e. we have a rough understanding of the borders between mechanistics and sentient beings. It is not one man's philosophical construct but rather a general consensus if you could say
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#327LLM 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 f…
You not understanding how it ML works does not not prove anything.
In the same way that you not understanding how lightning is formed does not prove the existence of Zeus.
Objectively, Zeus does not exist, can we convince everyone of that? Probably not. Does that matter? No.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't quote the whistleblower statutes from memory, but I believe that, even if we conceded your point about his state of mind: there is no law that Google would be violating. Is there some law regulating sentience of computer systems? Of course not. So is there a law about "developing dangerous weapons"? Maybe. But is "sentience" a dangerous weapon? You have to stretch the laws to the breaking point for your claim…
Legally speaking, I doubt that there's an actual law that applies for the welfare of AIs. Morally speaking, if society treats both human and animal abuse as a crime, then talking about the believed suffering of an AI would certainly fit the spirit of these sorts of legal protections. There are going to be some interesting question that might have to be seriously broached within our lifetime. Is an AI sentient? Can it…
Yeah, lawyers hate "interesting" cases. Taking on a case that "has previously only been the realm of science fiction" is not a resume builder.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...
I don't think he was ever really a practioner in the field- more like a SWE who transferred to an ML group and got delusions of grandeur.
Ooof
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that is the logic you are going to go by, you need to consider a large portion of humanity non-sentient, because people can very often just decide to ignore questions.
People ignore questions for a variety of reasons, mainly they didn't hear it, they didn't understand it, or they aren't interested in answering. Unless and until this AI can communicate that sort of thing, it's safest to just assume it didn't ignore the question so much as it got its wires crossed and answered it wrongly.
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