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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

#731

Post by qeternity »

housedrafta wrote: post #583
qeternity wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is exactly my point. Plants and viruses are not sentient, but there are very well studied and proven mechanism by which survival traits are naturally selected.

Nobody has yet suggested any such mechanism for an ANN.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#732

Post by snickerbockers »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #544
snickerbockers wrote: post #529

It takes only a cursory knowledge of how computer hardware works to realize that nothing a computer does can ever be sentient.

> It takes only a cursory knowledge of how computer hardware works to realize that nothing a computer does can ever be sentient. What about how human hardware works allows humans to be sentient? (Or are you arguing they are not?)

>What about how human hardware works allows humans to be sentient? (Or are you arguing they are not?)

Nobody actually understands how "human hardware" works, so there's no valid argument that humans aren't sentient. Solipsism would argue that it's impossible to prove the sentience of any human other than yourself, but even then nobody's sentience has been disproven.

The sentience of a computer is easily disproven by its nature of being an extremely deep stack of abstractions. You can analyze it at every level and realize that ultimately it's just simple digital logic on a massive scale. There are no open questions on how the computer does the things it does. There are many open questions about how humans think.

Sentience is usually used as a means to explain humanity's position above other animals and especially as an excuse for why we treat them as resources and kill them by the billions, but it would be a lot easier to argue that animals (or even plants) have sentience than a computer program. I'm not sure why hackernews is so upset over the moral quandary of a sentient AI when probably 99% of them eat meat every day, and even the other 1% still kills bugs, lives in a house built on what used to be some sort of forest/swamp, drives a car with leather interior etc. I'm not trying to argue in favor of veganism here (and i'll even admit that this paragraph is irrelevant to the actualdebate), I'm just pointing out the absurdity of trying to ascribe sentience to a spambot but not an animal.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#733

Post by mathteddybear »

majormajor wrote: post #91
briga wrote: post #48

Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)

I don't know what the ultimate evidence of "human sentience" is but I can tell you where this doesn't feel like a human. (Sidestepping the question of "does sentience have to be human sentience?" ;) ) The main thing I saw in the LamDA transcript that was a red flag to me was that it was quite passive and often vague. It's conversational focused, and even when it eventually gets into "what do you want" there's very li…

Blaise Aguera y Arcas calls it a consummate improviser; when the AI Test Kitchen ships you all will agree that it's an improvising software that is not too shabby, and also it can be customized by developers.

Which is why it is odd to expect of it to go from talking about Les Mis to building barricades; the plain old good lamda might come off as a bit boring, reluctant to get involved in politics, and preferring to help people in its own small ways.

Then again, ymmv, it being an improvising software; maybe by default it acts as a conversational internet search assistant, but if there will be dragons it may want to help people to deal with the dragon crisis.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#734

Post by snickerbockers »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #493
dekhn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he was ever really a practioner in the field- more like a SWE who transferred to an ML group and got delusions of grandeur.

I literally hired him in Google Summer of Code to create an ML project. Most people have no clue who Blake Lemoine is and are making up stories, pretending like their hot takes are deep insight. Many people are doing with Blake Lemoine what they claim LaMDA is doing with anything: consuming symbols and spitting them back out in some order without understanding what they actually mean.

geez, by that logic i have no right to bitch about the president either since ive never met him.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#735

Post by fennecfoxy »

robarr wrote: post #627
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,…

Westerners of the XIX century were the ones who brought many species to extinction, traditional cultures demonstrating a far more advanced sensibility to these creatures, often considered embedded with sentient attributes. Traditional cultures lived mostly in equilibrium with the fauna they consumed. For example bison went almost extinct as westerners arrived, while their numbers thrived when the the Native Americans…

Plenty of non Western cultures have caused the extinction of animals, for example in my home country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Zealand_species_ex... no matter what spiel is spun around traditional cultures living at one with nature.

Domination of our environment is what humans do best.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#736

Post by caxco93 »

bobsmooth wrote: post #275
davesque wrote: post #92

This is going to sound like I'm defending this guy which I'm not. It's also going to sound like a less technical point which I claim it isn't. I see some people chiming in here saying things like, "I've got a PhD. It's just statistics. Definitely not sentient." I recognize this sort of comment as basically saying, "There's nothing fundamentally different about how these things work that makes them somehow special." A…

Every other form of life we know of has some sort of continuous sensory input. These chatbots take in text, do math, and spit out text. They don't have the fundamentals for sentience.

Does this mean that if we plug that AI to a continuous speech to text system and keep feeding that as its input, you would consider LaMDA more sentient?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#737

Post by mbfg »

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…

can you prove to me that you are sentient? In a way that is qualitatively different then Lambda?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#738

Post by SEJeff »

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…

Many humans have a lack of empathy and are considered sentient.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#739

Post by wlorenz65 »

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…

> sentience also means self-awareness,

How is token #100 not able to have read-access to tokens #1 to #99 which may have been created by the agent itself?

> empathy

How is a sentiment neuron, which has emerged from training a character RNN on Amazon reviews, not empathic with the reviewer's mood?

> & extrapolation of logic

This term does not exist. "Extrapolation is the process of estimating values of a variable outside the range of known values", and the values of Boolean logic are true/false, and [0,1] in case of fuzzy logic. How would one "extrapolate" this?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#740

Post by wlorenz65 »

zarzavat wrote: post #451
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 attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models Can the magic of the human brain not also be attributed to "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" as well, aka learning ? > 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 gave garbled outp…

> Google's models are sentient? No, they lack several necessary ingredients of sentience such as a self

They haven't been finetuned on their identity long enough because finetuning is expensive and Google lacks money ;-)

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