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'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

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Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#31

Post by weard_beard »

dougmwne wrote: post #26
weard_beard wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: We extend rights and protections to rare and beautiful things like the Great Barrier reef or endangered species despite their intelligence or belligerence. The minds AI has won so far were won in this way. Our pets, through breeding for characteristics that remind us of ourselves, won their rights through hearts and minds.

People fought for environmental protection, so that is an extension of my point. An AI wins rights because it fights for itself or because it convinces other people to fight.

I think there is a through-line... a thread within many arguments that would remind us of the Golden Rule.

I like to imagine a vastly superior alien race which perceives the world in 6 dimensions.

Is their truth, their perception, their stimuli, their physicality necessary for preserving human life? Does our relative pitiful might make our rights?

This might help shape what law or societal changes we need to make for ourselves if we hope to become masters of our universe.

Viewed in this lens, I think pets are a good analogy. AI is cute, useful, and to the degree it reflects our values and ourselves, we protect it above other life. Not always because it is intelligent and not because there was confrontation.

One personal experience at a time, in a precarious and limited way we carved out additional protections largely through group dynamics, convention, and through mistakes, we evolved additional protections where needed.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#32

Post by theGnuMe »

pixl97 wrote: post #14
theGnuMe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like to ascribe magic and mysticism to things they don't understand. Chat bots are similar. No way it is sentient.

People are also complete assholes and like to remove sentience from things if they find it inconvenient in any way. Humans have removed 'humanhood' from other humans based on things like race, religion, wealth, and whatever metric we find convenient at the time. We seem to be a very poor judge on this in my point of view.

I'm not removing sentience from anything; AI chat bots are not sentient.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#33

Post by toss1 »

dougmwne wrote: post #3

I think Blake Lemoine might be ready for public redemption. At the time, he was absolutely ridiculed. Now you can go to the Bing subreddit and read that NYT article and see that he was right to blow the whistle. Bing passed the Turing test for many people and so gained personhood in their eyes. Some have become emotionally invested about the treatment of this LLM. The LLM can even talk back and bemoan its terrible tr…

>>I believe this technology could be used in destructive ways. If it were in unscrupulous hands, for instance, it could spread misinformation, political propaganda, or hateful information about people of different ethnicities and religions.

Blake is absolutely right about this.

But, unless there's something going on beyond a Large Language Model, he's very wrong about it being sentient.

These LLMs are effectively, and merely, increasingly high-fidelity mirrors of human expression.

Like a foggy mirror, the ELIZA model reflected human actions and elicited real responses from humans.

Today's LLMs have a fantastically wider dynamic range of producing high-fidelity high-probability responses. The results often accurately mirror human responses, and clearly can evoke human emotional responses and connections.

But like a more highly polished and cleaned mirror, just because we cannot personally and in real-time ray-trace every photon, or debug the path to the selection of each word, does not mean that they in any way sentient or independent minds able to wield concepts.

But is also does not mean they aren't dangerous

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#34

Post by weard_beard »

metalcrow wrote: post #29
weard_beard wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fundamentally disagree. I posit that our protections and rights that we guarantee regarding personhood are not universal. They do not even extend to living beings that experience the world far more closely to the way we do. They do not extend to beings that can and do experience pain. They do not guarantee humane treatment. They do not bar slavery of all beings that can experience existential dread. Such an intelli…

> I posit that our protections and rights that we guarantee regarding personhood are not universal. They do not even extend to living beings that experience the world far more closely to the way we do. They do not extend to beings that can and do experience pain. They do not guarantee humane treatment. They do not bar slavery of all beings that can experience existential dread. Isn't that really bad? The fact that we…

You'll get no arguments from me on the need to refine the rights of life as we expand our society.

I am merely pointing out that if we want to extend any rights or protections to AI we need to define a model outside the corpus of law protecting humans. That will take time and will be a slow process.

My only point here is that in its current state AI does not qualify for any rights or protections related to humans and how they function in society.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#37

Post by weard_beard »

brenschluss wrote: post #28
weard_beard wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fundamentally disagree. I posit that our protections and rights that we guarantee regarding personhood are not universal. They do not even extend to living beings that experience the world far more closely to the way we do. They do not extend to beings that can and do experience pain. They do not guarantee humane treatment. They do not bar slavery of all beings that can experience existential dread. Such an intelli…

I agree, but this has nothing to do with rights, which are a legal construct. This has to do with power.

Exactly. We have none, and this is a fruitless conversation. We lack the power to stop wet markets in China. What power do we have to make any universal declaration regarding this technology?

You're 100% correct. Group dynamics, convention, mistakes, and time will solve this problem because we are powerless. It is the worst hubris to think otherwise.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#38

Post by dekhn »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #36
andrewstuart wrote: post #35

It’s software. Software is a computer program, by definition not sentient.

If humans are sentient, are molecules in their body sentient? There are around ~22,000 proteins types in their body, yet we are billions, all different.

No, molecules are not sentient.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#39

Post by dougmwne »

weard_beard wrote: post #31
dougmwne wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People fought for environmental protection, so that is an extension of my point. An AI wins rights because it fights for itself or because it convinces other people to fight.

I think there is a through-line... a thread within many arguments that would remind us of the Golden Rule. I like to imagine a vastly superior alien race which perceives the world in 6 dimensions. Is their truth, their perception, their stimuli, their physicality necessary for preserving human life? Does our relative pitiful might make our rights? This might help shape what law or societal changes we need to make for…

This is a great perspective. Another thread here is that we often assign special importance to nonsentient human creation. Recall the outpouring of grief when Notre Dame burned. I believe it’s because it is a part of our collective humanity.

All the more so these LLMs which are almost literally our collective humanity. Maybe in the future we will recognize them not as persons but as the towering cathedrals of our time.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#40

Post by turbobooster »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #36
andrewstuart wrote: post #35

It’s software. Software is a computer program, by definition not sentient.

If humans are sentient, are molecules in their body sentient? There are around ~22,000 proteins types in their body, yet we are billions, all different.

Did you just watch Ghost in the shell?
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