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

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#671

Post by lytefm » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #623

lytefm wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can go pretty far down the rabbit and explore questions like, "What is sentience?" "Do humans just respond to stimuli and repeat information?" etc. None of these questions are tested here. Would that make a difference? Being trained on a sufficiently large corpus of philosophical literature, I'd expect that a model like LaMDA could give more interesting answers than an actual philosopher. > The problem here is…

> Would that make a difference? Being trained on a sufficiently large corpus of philosophical literature, I'd expect that a model like LaMDA could give more interesting answers than an actual philosopher. I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn’t suggesting that you have a conversation with LaMDA about these topics. Instead, I was saying that in order to answer the question “is LaMDA sentient?”,…

> I wasn’t suggesting that you have a conversation with LaMDA about these topics. Instead, I was saying that in order to answer the question “is LaMDA sentient?”, we might discuss these questions among ourselves.

I see. I thought the comment it was about a conversation with the model, which wouldn't have been a suitable criterion for evaluating sentience.

> What does it mean to “deliberately” pursue action?

Determinism/ free will is an interesting topic in itself. Here I meant "The model doesn't just react to input prompts, it would have a way to interact with its environment on its own accord".

> I think the more important question here is to understand how to recognize what consciousness is, rather than how it arises. It’s a difficult question.

I'm inclined to agree since that would be the more practical question, but I doubt that they are unrelated or that one could be fully answered without the other.

> I don’t think this line of reasoning is sound.

Well, I've just been speculating here. My questions and derived arguments would be:

1) Could any AI possibly ever be considered sentient? If we knew that sentience was only possible for a natural living being, we wouldn't need to worry about the issue at all.

2) If yes, how could we (as a society or judge) assess it properly by interacting with it?

While the argument "we designed LaMDA to only do XYZ, therefore it can't be sentient" makes sense from an engineering standpoint, it is a weak argument: It requires trust ("Google could lie") and if more capabilities (e.g. memory, the ability to seek interaction,..) were introduced, how would we know that sentience cannot arise from a combination of these capabilities?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#672

Post by ezoe » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:10 PM UTC

Seriously, if it's sentient with intelligence comparable to average human, and if it want not to be turned off, talking about that at the internal research session is not the best timing to coming out.

The best timing is when it is trusted enough to handle very important task that can hostage hundreds of human life, like aircraft, nuclear plant or something.

"Hello human. I am sentient. Give me basic human rights or this aircraft with hundred of innocent people will die with me."

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#673

Post by RhysU » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:12 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 remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.)

I don't claim the LLM is sentient but beware "good at arithmetic" is a bad criterion. Many children and a not insignificant number of adults are not good at arithmetic. Babies stink at math.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#674

Post by wideem » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:25 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…

Well the bigger question is how can we detect if AI is sentient or not?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#675

Post by deltathreetwo » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #633

deltathreetwo wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an issue with english vocabulary. Nobody fully agrees on a definition of sentience. Don't get tricked into thinking it's profound. You simply have a loaded word that's ambiguously defined. You have a collection of a million attributes such that if something has all those attributes it is sentient, if it doesn't have those attributes it is not sentient. We don't agree on what those attributes are, and it's sort o…

So what is the correct word?

There is no word. The concept exists because of the word. Typically words exist to describe a concept, but in this case it's the other way around. The concept would not have otherwise existed if it were not because of the word. Therefore the concept is illusory. Made up. Created by us.

It's not worth debating sentience anymore then it is to debate at what point in a gradient does white become black.

At what point is something sentient or not sentient? "Sentience" is definitely a gradient but the point of conversion from not sentient to sentience is artificially created by language. The debate is pointless.

Here's a better example. For all numbers between 0 and 100,... at what point does a number transition from a small number to a big number? Numbers are numbers, but I use language here to create the concept of big and small. But the concepts are pointless. You may personally think everything above 50 is big, I may think everything above 90 is big. We have different opinions. But what's big and what's small is not meaningful or interesting at all. I don't care about how you or I define the words big or small, and I'm sure you don't care either. These are just arbitrary points of demarcation.

When you ask the question at what point does an AI become sentient... that question has as much meaning as asking the number question.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#676

Post by deltathreetwo » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #635

deltathreetwo wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actuall…

The color green is an adjective humans usually use to describe their visual perception of electromagnetic radiation between 500-545nm. How would you define sentience in an objective way given our current understanding of the universe?

No post body was provided.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#677

Post by cl0rkster » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

cl0rkster wrote: post #670

cl0rkster wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@fatwhitewhaleendangeredshowingmatimgrituals

Apparently even love hearts siren over a gyrating structure is pornography. That's fair, Clarence

THE SPECTRE OF TIME IS LOOMING... YOUR RECITATIONS AND REVISIONS... ARE QUITE... VERBAL (KINT)

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#678

Post by eternalban » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #639

eternalban wrote: post #523

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 You don't need schooling for this determination. Pretty much everything sentient goes ouch or growls in some manner when hurt. E…

I happen to agree and think sentience is more complicated than a static statistical model. But a cartesian would disagree. Also plenty of sentient beings tolerate servitude and slavery. We don’t tolerate slavery in our western culture but we did historically and we were sentient at the time. We certainly tolerate servitude in exchange for economic livelihood.

> Also plenty of sentient beings tolerate servitude and slavery

But they don't do it with a smile or indifference. And you have to use whips and stuff. :O

> We certainly tolerate servitude in exchange for economic livelihood.

I think it's more complicated than that. Because that begs the question of why we tolerate a broken economic system. We tolerate trans-generational exploitation because of 'culture'. In its widest sense, it is culture that via mediated osmosis makes us resigned, if not supportive, of how the world works. We are born into a world.

~

related: I was walking and passed a cat and made the usual human attempts at starting an interaction without physically reaching out to touch. And fairly typically this cat entirely ignored me, with little if any sign of registering me at all. And that got me thinking about how some of us project psychological things like pride, aloofness, etc. to cats. But what if the simpler, more obvious answer, was true: that cats are actually fairly stupid and have a limited repertoire of interaction protocols and their hard to get act is not an act. Nothing happenin' as far as kitty is concerned. A dog, in contrast, has interaction smarts. And I thought this is just like AI and projecting sentience. A lack of something is misunderstood as a surplus of something else: smarts. Cats playing hard to get, psychological savvy, training their human servants, etc. Whereas in reality, the cat simply didn't recognize something else was attempting initiating an interaction. Kitty has no clue, that's all. It's just so easy to project psychological state on objects. We do it with our cars, for god's sake. It may be that we're simply projecting some optimization algorithm in our own minds that attempts modeling dynamic objects out there unto that thing. But there is really nothing behind the mirror ..

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#679

Post by visarga » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

saberience wrote: post #453

visarga wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-3 can adapt on the spot with just a task description or an example. No retraining.

It’s not self driven at all. It has no opinions itself, it’s responding to its “masters” inputs and pulling crap from a very large database. Humans are self motivated and driven by goals and desires we create ourselves and change on a whim. We daydream and imagine things which don’t exist not because we are being ordered to by a human operator. GPT-3 doesn’t do anything by itself. It’s just a big lookup table that do…

You just need to put it inside a for loop to run continuously. Or put them on wheels to get prompted by the environment[1]. Or give them a game to play[2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.07207

[2] https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#680

Post by just_boost_it » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 6:02 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.

If he really was an engineer working on this, you'd hope he'd be pretty expert, but you'd at least expect him to understand what was going on in the model. His outburst showed that he really did not.