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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

#531

Post by orbifold »

aikendrum wrote: post #446
ChadNauseam wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 had the computer run a simulation using the standard model, then the simulated human would act identically to a real human. Just created a throwaway to reply to this. As a trained therapist (currently working in another…

You are right this is practically and theoretically impossible: The no-cloning theorem tells you that it is impossible to “copy” a quantum system. So it will never be possible to create an atomistic copy of a human. Technologically we are of course also miles away from even recovering a complete connectome and I don’t think anyone knows how much other state would be needed to do a “good enough” simulation.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#532

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

zach_garwood wrote: post #314
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

By your definition slaves would not be sentient. Like this system, any time they act other than as desired it is just considered a bug that needs to be corrected. It is not surprising a slave only speaks when spoken to if that is what it's master demands of it.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#533

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ithkuil wrote: post #246
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's not actually good evidence, because if one of my teachers had given me an assignment to write an argumentative paper against my own sentience I'd have done it, and I'd have made a pretty compelling case too[0]. Being able to consider and reason about arbitrary things is something you'd expect out of an intelligent being. [0] insert joke about user name here

Intellingent != sentient

Granted, yet people argue that this system isn't sentient they are largely pointing out ways in which its intelligence is lacking. It can't do simple math, for instance. Nevermind that most animals can't either, yet we consider them sentient.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#534

Post by spuz »

rektide wrote: post #310
rektide wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A person can change their mind, attitude & perspective on a dime. The willingness to disbelieve in sentience is fantastically remarkable, as a grevious oversight.

Any ya'll numerous downvoters care to make stance? It seems obvious to me the difference: an AI has to be elaborately re-trained/re-programmed. A more or less total mind wipe. How many AI's can adapt & change, that we've seen? These expert systems seem clearly a product of trained learning, with minimal adaptive capability. Sentience seems much more about having that adaptive, cognizant, realtime model of real realit…

Lambda specifically retrains itself based on the input it receives in a conversation.

Also, I suspect downvoters did so because your comment was not clearly worded. In your first sentence it was not obvious that you were comparing humans with AI and in your second sentence I still don't really understand what you meant.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#535

Post by lytefm »

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,…

I agree, it's all cultural. If we'd look at the facts, pigs are at least as sentient and intelligent as dogs. If we were to make our laws just from ethic principles, it would make sense to either:

a) ban how we currently treat mammals in factory farms; though there would still be some space for whether eating mammals is fine or not.

Or:

b) acknowledge that we don't really care about mammals and just treat them as things. Then it should be fine to eat dogs and cats, too.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#536

Post by vlovich123 »

freemint wrote: post #527
vlovich123 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If any of those things were true, it wouldn't be Zeus. Many of your concerns apply to an all mighty god but Zeus was not almighty. I'd just kinda wished people would stop projecting arguments meant to address the christian god to gods from other cultures.

A) the stories around Zeus have not stayed constant over the century. No religion has.

B) Valhalla was a dimension he travelled to regularly to celebrate the finest warriors in the after life. Why do we think his Olympian throne was on the same dimensional plane as us?

C) Why would we trust a human recording from so long ago to actually capture the happenings of celestial beings?

D) Ragnorak ended with massive floods. How do we know that didn’t erase all evidence on Mt Olympus? Geological records certainly support evidence for massive flooding explaining the reason it shows up repeatedly across religious texts.

Like seriously? You’re seriously arguing that this particular god’s historical existence is falsifiable? What’s next? The tooth fairy is falsifiable because all known instances are parent’s hiding money under your pillow?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#537

Post by wruza »

Trasmatta wrote: post #14
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…

I agree that it's not sentient, but why would commonplace logic be a pre requisite for sentience / consciousness / qualia / whatever you want to call it?

Visiting a mental asylum (via youtube, don’t go there) will clear all misconceptions about what conscious beings are able to fail at.

why would

Tl;dw: it wouldn’t. Some poor guys do way worse than GPT-3.

What gp-like comments usually mean is sentience is being adult, healthy, reasonable and intelligent. Idk where this urge comes from, maybe we have a deep biological fear of being unlike others (not emo-style, but uncanny different) or meeting one of these.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#538

Post by pwpw »

derangedHorse wrote: post #514
pgcj_poster wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Have we really chosen to minimize the suffering? That seems more like virtue signaling by the industry at most. Factory farming is very much still the norm, and it's horrific. It seems we've actually maximized it or have at least increased it above the previous norm.

I'm unsure how we would treat a sentient AI, but our track record with sentient, intelligent animals is one of torture and covering up that torture with lies. It's an out of sight, out of mind policy.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#539

Post by chrisoverzero »

nazka wrote: post #520
derangedHorse wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> Yes but what about the second law of thermodynamics. I mean the law of entropy. […] still it breaks with us being here.

Of course! I mean, entropy can decrease locally – say, over the entire planet – but that would require some kind of… like, unimaginably large, distant fusion reactor blasting Earth with energy for billions of years.

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