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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

#501

Post by srvmshr »

jstanley wrote: post #498
srvmshr wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. But then I risk getting sounded vainly opinionated, especially on HN without basis if I don't give a disclaimer that I have spent half a decade working on these specific things. Too often, people get called out for no reason. And that sometimes hurt. (If I was credentials hopping I would rather put a longer list of illustrious institutions, co-authors and awards, just saying. I am not - its just just…

This is just a (not even) thinly-veiled appeal to authority. I'm not saying you're wrong, but your credentials don't make you right.

Absolutely agree. I edited my post to add the credential because elsewhere in this thread someone callously called me a "garden variety fraud"

You're welcome to prove any of my conclusions wrong. It actually incentivizes me - it shows someone is willing to listen and engage with what I spent some years learning. The way I see its a win-win. Nothing makes a researcher happier to see someone taking interest to indulge. But letting know by an edit, where I stand, is a means of mental preservation. It hurts to get dissed irrationally

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#503

Post by claudiawerner »

stale2002 wrote: post #423
laserlight wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for clarifying. I think the question is more about sentience than ML. So, a PhD in philosophy would suit better your initial claim.

No it would not. Philosophy people wrap themselves up in so many circular self justifying presuppositions that they can make up whatever arguments they want to justify almost anything. It is much better to listen to people who study other, more falsifiable claims, in the material world.

This is an uncharitable view of philosophy without much evidence to show for it, especially when it comes to the philosophy of consciousness and philosophy of computing. Not to mention, falsifiability being taken as the criterion for knowledge was itself (mathematics and logical axioms are not 'falsifiable') a claim produced by a philosopher, and one which some commentators name as circular in itself. You're using a particular philosophy to discount philosophy of science on the whole, which is ironic.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#504

Post by jobigoud »

sudosysgen wrote: post #137
grumpopotamus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.) These things are orthogonal to sentience.

Not really. Anything that's sentient should have the general intelligence to figure out addition. Make mistakes, sure, but at least understand the concept.

Addition of large numbers is a bar that most sentient animals don't pass.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#505

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

dcow wrote: post #319
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 f…

In retrospect, taking part in this kind of conversation on HN makes me feel like an idiot and so I retract my earlier comment (by overwriting it with the current one, since I can't delete it anymore) just because I don't want to contribute. I was wrong to make an attempt to make a serious contribution. There is no seriousness in conversations on such matters, as "sentience", "intelligence", "understanding" etc etc. on HN.

Everytime that such a subject comes up, and most times "AI" comes up also, a majority of users see it as an invitation to say whatever comes in their mind, whether it makes any sense at all or not. I'm not talking about the comments replying below in particular, but about the majority of this conversation. It's like hearing five-year old kids debating whether cheerios are better than coco pops (but without the cute kids making it sound funny, it's just cringey). The conversation makes no sense at all, it is not based on any concrete knowledge of the technologies under discussion, the opinions have not been met with five seconds of sensible thinking and the tone is pompous and self-important.

It's the worst kind of HN discussion and I'm really sorry to have commented at all.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#506

Post by philliphaydon »

zach_garwood wrote: post #237
kareemsabri wrote: post #15

Earlier 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...

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.

Any job that requires me to even interview in anything other than jeans and a tshirt or polo isn’t somewhere I want to work. If someone doesn’t take me seriously it’s their loss. Life’s too short to be uncomfortable.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#507

Post by yodsanklai »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #171
breckenedge wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s more of a philosophical question than one that can be answered in a straightforward way. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

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…

The hard problem is "how conscious can be explained purely mechanistically?". "hard problem" is just a label from this question. So I don't get how say there's no hard problem. It seems to be a legitimate question which nobody can answer.

The philosophical zombie is just a thought experiment to help understanding the distinction between conscience and IO.

Another thought experiment that I like is the macroscopic brain. Imagine a huge mechanical device composed of mechanical entities simulating neurons. Would this whole thing be conscious? and how would we know?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#508

Post by jobigoud »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #178
groffee wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once people understand that sentience also means self-awareness, empathy & extrapolation of logic to assess unseen task ... Tell that to mentally deficient people (no self-awareness), psychopaths (no empathy) and morons (couldn't spell logic never-mind use it) That said though I do agree with you overall. 'Machine learning' is headed in the wrong direction, and models like GPT-3 are frankly a joke.

There are degrees of sentience

Yep. And this also implies that once machines are above zero on the sentience scale they will continue up and will move past human-level sentience just like they moved past human-level chess playing. It's actually worrying ethically because a super-sentient being could experience extreme feelings compared to us, including extreme happiness and sadness, extreme psychological pain, etc.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#509

Post by vlovich123 »

freemint wrote: post #399
oefrha wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Objectively, Zeus does not exist Speaking as a theoretical physicist: we don't know that. What we do know is we have a better explanation for lightning within a conceptually simple framework (starting from a few simple principles) with predictive power, compared to an explanation that involves some mysterious old dude doing mysterious things with no evidence whatsoever. Could Zeus or Thor or whatever exist? Sure; t…

We know Zeus doesn't exist because Zeus is supposed to sit on Mount Olympus and he isn't there.

How do you know that the universe wasn’t created 1 picosecond ago spontaneously in its exact form so that you’re having the same thoughts?

How do you even know that anyone else exists and this is all not a figment of your imagination?

From the perspective of the philosophy of science, it’s 100% impossible to disprove non-falsifiable statements. So scientifically speaking OP is 100% correct. Science has no opinion on Zeus. All it says is “here’s an alternate theory that only depends on falsifiable statements and the body of evidence has failed to falsify it”. Science can only ever say “here’s something we can disprove and we have tried really hard and failed”. Whether that lines up with how the universe works is an open question. Epistemologically it’s seemed a far better knowledge model for humanity to rely on in terms of progress in bending the natural world to our whims and desires.

So if you’re testing the statement “Zues was a historical being that physically exists on the same physical plane as us on Mt Olympus” then sure. That’s a pretty falsifiable statement. If the statement is “Does Zeus, a mythical god that can choose how he appears to humans if they can even see him and can travel between planes of existence, exist and live on Mt Olympus” is not something falsifiable because a god like that by definition could blind you to their existence. Heck, how do you even know that the top of Mt Olympus is empty and Zeus not that he just goes ahead and wipes the memory of anyone he lets return alive? Heck, what if he does exist but the only reason it was Olympus at the time because that’s what made sense to human brains encountering him in Greece. What if he actually exists in the core of the Sun?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#510

Post by pgcj_poster »

fxtentacle wrote: post #411
dcow wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the actual firing is very objective. He was under NDA but violated it. They reminded him to please not talk in public about NDA-ed stuff and he kept doing it. So now they fired him with a gentle reminder that "it's regrettable that [..] Blake still chose to persistently violate [..] data security policies". And from a purely practical point of view, I believe it doesn't even matter if Lemoine's theory of sent…

> Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken?

Well, for one thing, the norm of eating meat was established long before our current moral sensibilities were developed. I suspect that if cows or pigs were discovered today, Westerners would view eating them the same as we view other cultures eating whales or dogs. If we didn't eat meat at all and someone started doing it, I think we would probably put them in jail.

Sentient AI have a big advantage over animals in this respect on account of their current non-existence.

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