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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

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581–590 of 749 posts

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#581
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…

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...

No post body was provided.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#582
post #535

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,…

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 thi…

>> Then it should be fine to eat dogs and cats, too.

I didn't know it's not "fine" to eat dogs and cats. I though it's just a matter of preferrence taste wise

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't a sentient machine want to continue it's existence? Evolution doesn't have to come into play at all for these things to exist, that's just one way of making such biological machines.

That’s now how this works, you come up with a hypothesis, and then prove it. You don’t do the opposite. So, why would a machine want to continue its existence? How would that feedback loop come to exist? In biology, Darwinian forces have a good explanation. I’ve never heard one for non-reproductive systems. We know exactly the cost function by which these models respond, because that’s basically the main element that…

What do you consider life that wants to continue its existence, but does not decide? Are plants or viruses sentient?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#584

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...

I don't think "practitioner of the field" counts for much in this case. In reading his open letter, it was pretty apparent that he'd well and truly crossed over from thinking about the situation rationally into the realm of "I want to believe". If you ask enough practitioners in any given field the same question, you're nearly guaranteed to eventually get a super wonky response from one of them. The specific field do…

No post body was provided.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#586
post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that people, including credentialed experts, have quick and easy answers to what makes a person a person, and really good language models expose a few of the weaknesses in those definitions. People still want to derive an "ought" from an "is".

How is it a problem in the case that you can fairly easily rule out the model being a person by any useful definition?

Useful for what, and for who?

I think it should be ruled out, but "by any useful definition" is wrong because "use" is at the heart of the matter here.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#587
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the entire human experiment, because the AI will be put toward malevolent ends and we, as a species, shall fail. The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

This is the dominant history of the next century in certain circles. It's become cliché by repetition and doesn't seem to require any justification. People just vibe with it. Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. By my reckoning, anyway.

> Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer.

From the 7th/8th century until the 15th century, the feudal mode of production predominates in Europe. It still exists in some form today - the United Kingdom (note the name) is technically ruled by a queen, as is Spain, Holland etc. Someone in the 9th century saying feudalism would end would not have seen much of the prediction come true 500 years later in the 14th century. But then the crack-up started.

10,000 years ago slave empires arose in Sumeria, Egypt and other places. Slave latifundias in Italy lasted past the sack of Rome. Someone predicting the end of slavery in ancient Sumeria would look like a faulty predicted. Peter Mills was born a slave in the USA and did not die until 1972. So people here could have met him and discussed this with him.

Migratory hunter-gatherer bands painted in caves and carved Venus figurines tens of thousands of years ago. If you told the painter in the Chauvet cave 35,000 years ago that this mode of production would end, he might say that this would be false worldwide for another 25,000 years and that in 2022 AD, deep in the Amazon migratory hunter gatherer bands still roamed.

You seem to have a mental capacity on par with by-weekly sprint deliverables, and are looking at your watch for the end of capitalism, the commodity, bourgeois republics, Sand Hill Road VCs approaching LPs to raise new funds, corporate media, the aristocracy of heirs that send their children to Phillips Exeter, accelerating carbon into the atmosphere, dividends, rents, interest and other rentier instruments etc. I'm afraid history does not happen on this time table so you can continue to feel self-satisfied that whereas hunter gathering fell after tens of thousands of years, slavery for thousands, feudalism for centuries - that capitalism enthroned will be the mode of production henceforth and forever. History shows this is not the case. I look today at the inflation, what may be two quarters of GDP contraction, the stock market dive and firms cutting hiring and no one knowing what the year will hold amidst European and world energy potential energy crises, and think it does not look as bad yet as the subprime crisis of 2008 or dot com crash of 2000, and how Marx said such financial crises tend to worsen over time due to contradictions he pointed out, and the economic system goes on trial with each economic crisis. I see masses going out to rally for the socialist Bernie Sanders, and other masses listening to Tucker Carlson and rallying for Trump, neither of whom seem to be fond of "free trade" deals, the international migration of labor, foreign military interventions for capital etc.

In 2020 the massive crowds were for the socialist and for the other candidate lambasting free trade deals. Unlike 2016, the establishment was ready and got their candidate elected, someone no one seems to particularly care for. Young people seem to have a change of mind as well. The picture I see is quite different, but so is the timetable.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#588

Quick... The meat bags are doing that unique thing in history where they discuss and condemn themselves with no sense of irony. I doubt a third party will be necessary for anything in their case other than damage reduction as they exit the universe.

To clarify... I'm human... But I've read no better description of my human experience than how these letter soup machines are named and described. Sentiment and sentience? Those are big words for people who like smelling their own farts.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#589

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,…

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.

Cool. Many people agree with you that it's wrong to eat intelligent animals. However, the effect of intelligence on people's perceptions of moral worth is smaller for animals that people in our culture eat. For instance, most respondents in a U.K. survey said that it would be wrong to eat a tapir or fictional animal called a "trablan" if it demonstrated high levels of intelligence, but they were less likely to say it would be immoral to eat pigs if they demonstrated the same level of intelligence.

https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/80041/1/When_meat_gets...

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#590
post #69

Less surprised about this outcome than that the guy was a Google engineer in the first place. Their hiring standards seem so high from the outside, yet this guy comes across as barely computer-literate, the kind who would have fervently demanded an in-person session with the ELIZA 'therapist' in the 70's. He really should know better what's under the hood. I guess he got carried away by his impressions, or he's playi…

Also keep in mind that "big tech" doesn't mean a bigger number of engineers. In my experience with Big Tech, even if engineers make a reasonable part of the workforce, non-tech sectors are always bigger.
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