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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

#561

Post by jasonm23 »

lagrange77 wrote: post #450
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…

Right. > Also, we as society have already chosen how to deal with sentient beings, and it's mostly ignorance. The Orville Season 3 Episode 7 is about that theme. Highly recommend it.

I was thinking about the Kaylon events too. Humans abusing entities like that is unimaginable though isn't it.

/S

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#562

Post by steego »

visarga wrote: post #364
srvmshr wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

As humans we get prompted all the time, it's called having a job. Or you could even say the environment is prompting us.

So when you're not prompted, you just stare into space without a thought in your head?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#563

Post by deltathreetwo »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#564

Post by JasonFruit »

treeman79 wrote: post #548
elif wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This mirrors a recent Supreme Court cases and the beliefs of both sides.

I had wondered when I first heard of this if it was some sort of performance art in support of the unborn. It appears not, but it was still thought-provoking.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#565

Post by notahacker »

jobigoud wrote: post #504
sudosysgen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true. Its also true that most sentient animals can't transform corpuses of ASCII text into somewhat novel, syntactically correct and topical responses to a prompt. So some degree of facility with wordplay and math clearly isn't necessary for sentience.

Is it sufficient though? I think that's more interesting when considering the other angle: we've had specialised machines that can do sums - usually considered a sign of intelligence in humans and certainly a bar most sentient animals can't cross - for decades now. Is that high performance at a specialised task sufficient evidence of sentience of a pocket calculator? If not (presumably because math is pretty orthogonal to higher order mammals' evolved emotional imperatives to act) what is it about stochastic optimisation of ASCII or pixel inputs with satisfying results that's so very different?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#566

Post by JasonFruit »

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'm a Westerner, and I'm completely okay with people eating whatever animals are a) not exceptionally intelligent, and b) not exceptionally rare. Cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, horses, sure; whales, chimpanzees, crows, no.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#567

Post by deltathreetwo »

chrisoverzero wrote: post #539
nazka wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Entropy is a consequence of probability.

Which means that it can actually decrease without an energy input. There's just a very low probability of it happening but it CAN happen.

It's a misnomer to call those things laws of thermodynamics. They are not axiomatic. There's a deeper intuition going on here that increasing entropy is just a logical consequence of probability being true.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#568

Post by steego »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #76
throwoutway wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just seems one engineer failed to acknowledge that he failed the Turing Test even with insider information, and (according to Google) was told he was wrong, but decided to double down and tell the public all about how wrong he was. To which they reported on because the claims were so laughable

The guy is unhinged and has a persecution complex. He is a "priest" in a bizarre sect and has long claimed that Google has it out for him because of his religious practice. This was a publicity stunt plain and simple.

His goal was always to launch his career as America's first AI priest, publish a book and become a talking head.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#569

Post by deltathreetwo »

oefrha wrote: post #355
mrcartmeneses wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

Another thing to consider is that "sentience" is a loaded word. You're all just arguing over vocabulary and the definition of a word.

Simply put, sentience is just a combination of thousands attributes such that if something has all those attributes it is "sentient."

The attributes are so many that it's hard to write down all the attributes, additionally nobody fully agrees what those attributes are. So it is actually the definition of a word that is very complex here. But that's all it is. There isn't really a profound concept going on here.

All these arguments are going in circles because the debate focuses around vocabulary. What is the one true definition of "sentience." Sort of like what is the definition of the color green? Where exactly does green turn to blue on the color gradient? The argument is about vocabulary and the definition of green, that's it... nothing profound here at all.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#570

Post by pgcj_poster »

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…

> Are you saying norms established before our current moral sensibilities it goes under our current radar?

Yes. That's clearly something that happens in human society. For instance, many of the US founding fathers were aware that slavery contradicted the principles they were fighting for. However, slavery was so ingrained in their society that most didn't advocate for abolition, or even free their own slaves.

> 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.

If that's the case, then why do most Westerners object to eating dogs and whales? As far as I can tell, it's just because we have an established norm of eating pigs and chickens but not dogs or whales.

> Instead we've just chosen to minimize the suffering leading to the loss of life

99% of meat is produced in factory farms. It's legal and routine for chickens to have their beaks cut off to prevent them from packing each other to death, which they're prone to do when confined to tiny cages. Most consumers object to such practices when asked, but meat consumption is so ingrained in our culture that most people just choose not to think about.

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