Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient • Hacker News Board

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#601

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

kittiepryde wrote: post #595

drdrek wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The philosophical argument is just not relevant. If you peek through a keyhole you may mistake a TV for real people, but if you look through the window you will see that its clearly not. Inputting language models with very specific kind of questions will result in text that is similar to what a person may write. But as the comment above, by an expert no less, mentioned is that if you test it with any known limitation…

I think a very intelligent alien could think the same of us. if you test the human with any known limitation of their architecture (like making conclusions or just changing the form of the question enough) you will immediately see that is in fact very much not even remotely close to sentient

that does not seem to make a lot of sense, but it looks like your objective was just reusing the other posters words

maybe you can give a fitting example of an English sentence that these aliens would come up with, which humans would be totally unable to respond to in a way which makes sense?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#602

Post by unethical_ban » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #372

motohagiography wrote: post #312

Good, as imagine what you would need to believe to equivocate between people and shell scripts. I really think this view is more indicative of a peer enabled personality disorder than insight or compassion. I'm very harsh about this because when I wondered what belief his equivocation was enabling, it became clear that the person involved could not tell fiction from truth. The belief in the aliveness of the code rein…

I don't understand why everyone here is talking about Lambda not being sentient or Lemoine's state of mind. None of that is relevant here. He was fired for literally taking confidential information and leaking it straight to the press. This is instant firing at any company.

It may be legally cut and dried, but the next question is do we as a society trust Google to act ethically with such substantial developments? Assuming he were correct, and Google was suppressing information, would he be in the moral right to leak it?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#603

Post by hallway_monitor » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

pohl wrote: post #593

treeman79 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're exactly right. Will we ever see a day where the currently-unthinkable is commonly accepted: that women are sentient?

When is a fetus sentient?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#604

Post by SkyMarshal » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:41 PM UTC

refulgentis wrote: post #382

SkyMarshal wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a recent post either here or on Twitter where someone took the questions Blake asked the AI about how it feels to be sentient, and replaced “sentient” with “cat” and had the same conversation with it. It’s clearly not self aware.

That's not possible because it's internal to Google: you're right about the post existing, though, I found it very misleading because it was replicating with GPT-3. Blake is certainly misguided, though.

Seems like an easy test to give any AI. I didn’t read all of Blake’s transcript with the AI, did he do any kind of similar test with it?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#605

Post by User23 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

mr_mitm wrote: post #598

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…

Is there a test for sentience or self-awareness? Is it considered a binary property or can sentience or self-awareness be measured? I suspect it is not binary, because I completely lack sentience while asleep or before a certain age, and it doesn't really feel like a phase transition when waking up. Rarely, there are phases where I feel half-sentient. Which immediately leads to the question of how it can be measured,…

> because I completely lack sentience while asleep or before a certain age

All you can say is you don’t remember. Children who are too young to form reliable long term memories still form short term ones and are observably sentient from birth and by extrapolation before, albeit in a more limited fashion than adults.

This is more than a quibble, because it’s been used to justify barbaric treatment of babies with the claimed justification that they either don’t sense pain or it doesn’t matter because they won’t remember.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#606

Post by WesolyKubeczek » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

steego wrote: post #562

visarga wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I don’t have any inputs whatsoever, I’m likely dead. So, sort of yes.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#607

Post by civilized » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

VictorPath wrote: post #587

civilized wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feudal…

Despite the amusingly hamfisted swipe at my intellect, I was interested enough to try and get something out of this. Your point seems to be that economic systems do sometimes change, so my presumptive belief that capitalism will last forever is probably wrong? I suppose that's trivially true, but we must try to understand our own time to have a chance at guessing when the next upheaval might come.

What do you make of the PRC's experience? It seems that the smartest, most sincere, most dominant communists the world has ever seen... became capitalists.

They claim to be on the Official Marxist Dialectical Materialist Path to True Socialism, but it sounds like lip service to me. Xi is taking China more towards North Korea than the elusive communist paradise.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#608

Post by sholladay » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

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 with you, there seems to be very little here that demonstrates sentience and very little that is unexplainable. That said, based on how much we struggle with defining and understanding animal intelligence, perhaps this is just something new that we don’t recognize.

I am skeptical that any computer system we will create in the next 50 years (at least) will be sentient, as commonly understood. Certainly not at a level where we can rarely find counter evidence to its sentience. And until that time, any sentience it may have will not be accepted or respected.

Human children also make tons of mistakes. Yet, while we too often dismiss their abilities, we don’t discount their sentience because of it. We are, of course, programmed to empathize with children to an extent, but beyond that, we know they are still learning and growing, so we don’t hold their mistakes against them the way we tend to for adults.

So, I would ask, why not look at the AI as a child, rather than an adult? It will make mistakes, fail to understand, and it will learn. It contains multitudes

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#609

Post by nazka » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#610

Post by cl0rkster » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:45 PM UTC

cl0rkster wrote: post #600

cl0rkster wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite was the one person who claimed their title defines scientific authority telling us about "the incredible ability to forget" (or some such loaded terms)... I'm a man of science and as has been discussed many times in many ways, even Zeus's legacy survives modernity if it's got a "non-falsifiable" argument. That's pathetic if a bunch of powerful sex preditor people get logical treatment instead of correctio…

Isn't the point of science to admit that we can't verify a thing, but we find utility in understanding it better? Asking for a friend who avoided the field and had so much to offer.

"usefully uncovering the constant and unique curiosities of our machine" == SCIENCE (no loaded, accredited, or incomplete thing will be treated as truth... Just useful)