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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

#511

Post by [deleted] »

srvmshr wrote: post #442
ekianjo wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone with a PhD in this domain you dont need to use phd credentials to have an opinion on this matter

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#512

Post by morelisp »

anigbrowl wrote: post #208
dntrkv wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch his interviews. He’s doing all this to make a point about companies not taking AI ethics seriously.

Which I expected to be developed in a book and speaking tour. These philosophical questions aren't new, Hofstadter and Dennett were exploring them >30 years ago in The Mind's I and other writers had been toying with the ideas for decades before that.

His actual points in e.g. the Bloomberg interview are considerably more mundane than Dennett's far-future musings. I think it's clear he's trying to get more attention on how dysfunctional/powerless the AI ethics group at Google is to deal with even the real "doctors are men nurses are women" sort of ethical issues. (In particular pay attention to how he frames his question to Page and Brin about public involvement.)

I would say it's been at least a moderate success so far, though I don't see it having much staying power. But then neither did the factual accounts of Google firing ethicists who went against the bottom line, so it wasn't really a bad idea.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#513

Post by nazka »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #505
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…

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. o…

As a counter argument if LLM is sentient or any other model will be, this model will be created by some superior being right? Why humans shouldn’t be? After all we can’t even fully understand DNA or how our brains work even with a 7B population planet and an army of scientists. How come we can’t understand something that was supposed to be coming from “just random stuff” for millions of years with 0 intelligence meaning rolling dices? Also that totally breaks the low of entropy. It’s turning it all upside down.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#514

Post by derangedHorse »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #510
fxtentacle wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Are you saying norms established before our current moral sensibilities it goes under our current radar? If you are I wholeheartedly disagree with that sentiment. We still eat pigs and chickens because we've culturally decided as a society that having the luxury of eating meat ranks higher than our moral sensibilities towards preserving sentient life in our list of priorities. Instead we've just chosen to minimize the suffering leading to the loss of life as an attempt to reach some kind of moral middle ground.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#516

Post by bnralt »

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…

> how we are going to socially deal with the increasing frequency of Lamoire-types we will certainly encounter.

That's not really a new issue, we only have to look at issues like abortion, animal rights, or euthanasia[1] to see situations where people fundamentally disagree about these concepts and many believe we're committing unspeakable atrocities against sentient beings. More Lamoire types would add another domain to this debate, but this has been an ongoing and widespread debate that society has been grappling with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#517

Post by wruza »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #396
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…

Issue is that we don’t need it to explain humans either. Most people think that a human is sentient and a rock isn’t – but humans and rocks are both atoms bouncing around, so you need an explanation for what’s different. I think most physicists think that if you started with a description of the positions and velocities etc of all the particles in a human, and put them into a supercomputer the size of the moon, and h…

would the simulated human have a simulated consciousness, or would it have a consciousness that’s just as real as yours or mine despite coming from a simulation

What does “real” mean? Isn’t it too anthropic to real-ify you and me and not some other being which acts similarly? What prevents “realness” to emerge in any complex enough system? We’re going to have a big trouble when non-biological aliens show up. Imagine going to the other planet full of smart entities and finding out their best minds are still sort of racist for what’s “real” or “just simulated”, because come on, a conscious meat sack is still an open question.

(Not defending Lemoine, he’s clearly confused)

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#518

Post by elif »

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…

If he truly believed it to be life, and in danger of being destroyed, he has an obligation to whistle blow.

"The Measure of a Man" in season 2 of Star Trek The Next Generation comes to mind.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#519

Post by derangedHorse »

nazka wrote: post #513
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. o…

As a counter argument if LLM is sentient or any other model will be, this model will be created by some superior being right? Why humans shouldn’t be? After all we can’t even fully understand DNA or how our brains work even with a 7B population planet and an army of scientists. How come we can’t understand something that was supposed to be coming from “just random stuff” for millions of years with 0 intelligence mean…

Not really. Why would we be able to understand it? It seems implicit in your argument that "rolling dices" (or just any series of random events) can't breed the complexity of that of DNA or the human brain. I disagree with your stance and will remind you that the landscape for randomness to occur is the entire universe and the timescale for life on Earth to happen took 4-5 billion years with the modern human only appearing within the last couple hundred thousand years.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#520

Post by nazka »

derangedHorse wrote: post #519
nazka wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter argument if LLM is sentient or any other model will be, this model will be created by some superior being right? Why humans shouldn’t be? After all we can’t even fully understand DNA or how our brains work even with a 7B population planet and an army of scientists. How come we can’t understand something that was supposed to be coming from “just random stuff” for millions of years with 0 intelligence mean…

Not really. Why would we be able to understand it? It seems implicit in your argument that "rolling dices" (or just any series of random events) can't breed the complexity of that of DNA or the human brain. I disagree with your stance and will remind you that the landscape for randomness to occur is the entire universe and the timescale for life on Earth to happen took 4-5 billion years with the modern human only app…

Yes but what about the second law of thermodynamics. I mean the law of entropy. Now that’s not something from the Bible or anything but it’s a law accepted by all scientific communities out there and still it breaks with us being here. In fact us being here like you said bilions of years after the Big Bang makes it all upside down since from that point less order and more chaos can only emerge. Even with bilions of years and rolling dices.

Also I don’t think you can create something sentient without understanding it. (And I don’t even think we can create something sentient at all). But I mean it’s like building a motor engine without knowing anything you are doing and then being like oh wow I didn’t know what I was doing but here it is a motor engine. Imagine with this with aspect of sentient. It’s like too much fantasy to me to be honest like a Hollywood lightning strike and somehow live appears type of things.

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