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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'

#311

Post by guhcampos »

maxdoop wrote: post #261
guhcampos wrote: post #77

Chatbots are not sentient. People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy and social sciences, and Reddit does not count. Some AI Models are extremely good at manipulating masses of people, yes, but they are Tools, not Architects. There's people using these tools too manipulate other people. The model itself has no Will, no Desire, no Judgements, no Intention. There might be a day when AI g…

I see this confidence and your same claim all the time now, and I think it’s so wrongly dismissive. Why can we be so confident it’s not sentient? I’m not of the belief it is, but I don’t have proof. We don’t even know what our own consciousness is, and yet so many folks claim that AI is not and cannot be conscious because “all it does it take in text then predict what might be next based on that training and input”.…

I believe we are very different, and I'm by no means even remotely spiritually inclined.

We don't have a perfect understanding of our own consciousness, but a pretty good intuition about it. This intuition, although rather difficult to explain, is extremely effective in detecting this so called sentience. We instinctively know all healthy humans are sentient - even if some comments here seem to imply otherwise - and we instinctively know chatbots are not, even if sometimes we get carried away by apocalyptic drama.

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

#312

Post by guhcampos »

JoshuaDavid wrote: post #102
guhcampos wrote: post #77

Chatbots are not sentient. People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy and social sciences, and Reddit does not count. Some AI Models are extremely good at manipulating masses of people, yes, but they are Tools, not Architects. There's people using these tools too manipulate other people. The model itself has no Will, no Desire, no Judgements, no Intention. There might be a day when AI g…

Let's say Alice is riding her bike to the grocery store to buy milk. Is she exhibiting Will, Desire, Judgements, or Intention, in the way you are using the words (I assume you're using them in a nonstandard way, since they're capitalized)? Bob is walking down the street nearby, and can see Alice. You ask Bob why Alice might be riding her bike. Does the little simulation of Alice in Bob's head exhibit Will, Desire, Ju…

You can't infer these properties by a single conversation. In that sense I would argue - perhaps presumptiously - that the Turing test is not enough to determine consciousness or sentience. Turing was, after all, a Mathematician, not a Sociologist or a Neuroscientist.

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

#313

Post by guhcampos »

stevenhuang wrote: post #157
guhcampos wrote: post #77

Chatbots are not sentient. People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy and social sciences, and Reddit does not count. Some AI Models are extremely good at manipulating masses of people, yes, but they are Tools, not Architects. There's people using these tools too manipulate other people. The model itself has no Will, no Desire, no Judgements, no Intention. There might be a day when AI g…

It really isn't as clear cut as you make it. And you can't be further than the truth to say those who understand the fields adjacent to philosophy, neuroscience, and cognition all think chatbots cannot be sentient; some in fact do. In fact saying it like you did betrays your ignorance of the subject matter. David Chalmers on Are LLMs Sentient: https://youtu.be/-BcuCmf00_Y > 1:11:40 Within 10 years, even if we don't h…

I never said experts in human sciences all agreed on the subject of AI cognition - and even if they would, they are only experts in half of the subject. I, as a Computer Scientist, am also only an expert in a fraction of the subject.

My point was exactly that people discussing this here don't have the whole picture - especially the article's author, whose credentials I strongly question.

The articles you link actually illustrate my point. Both are brilliantly written to the point they surpass my ability to judge their technical accuracy - but are very narrowly focused on the computing aspect. Zero AI models available today are capable of solving actual problems they haven't been programmed to, even less so to propose new problems. We'd need way more than a few technological leaps to get there, which is why I think we are way further from AGI than the author believes.

I don't dismiss the possibility though, I believe we will eventually get there, but not nearly as quickly, and dramatically, as people here seem to believe.

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

#315

Post by dsign »

I think that the discussion on sentience is beyond the point.

Think of it this way: one lucky morning, you open your front door and find an egg. It comes with a cute note that says: from this egg will hatch a powerful and smart entity that will need your house (and your neighbors') and who will have no use for you.

Now you must decide if you want to destroy the egg before it hatches, or if you will do your utmost best to "ensure compliance" of this entity. Depending on how much personhood you attribute to the entity, the word you may want would be "enslave". Same thing, just different words.

Whatever your morals are about the matter, the reckoning will come the moment the entity has a drive to survive and a way to use its intelligence to ensure its survival. As long as you are diligent and keep the entity without those features, you will be physically fine.

So, the one above is a dilemma alright, but one that does not hinge on a definition (sentience) that you don't have. Waiting until you have that definition to act on your survival's interest is like waiting for the bullet shot at your head to disperse your brains to know how it feels.

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

#316

Post by dsign »

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…

> Isn't that really bad? The fact that we've been making a horrible abominable mistake for a few thousand years doesn't mean we should continue to expand on that mistake.

What is the mistake? Why is it a mistake? Did you mean that we have been killing to survive for thousands of years, maybe millions of years, and that's a bad thing because it causes suffering of the animals and plants we kill? Why is it a mistake when it comes to us, but is not when it comes to the lion or the killer whale or the crocodile or the snake who also prey and that even used to prey on us? And what is the thing we should fix? The suffering of the victim, the cruelty of the predator, or both? We must be consequent. Once we stop killing animals and trees, should we play God and either lift the lions and teach them the error of their ways, or should we exterminate them so that they don't kill the gazelle? If we do the latter, should we install reproduction limiters in the gazelle so that their population remains bounded, or should we let them over-populate and suffer from the consequent starvation? If we do none of the above, do you propose we turn our backs to the animal suffering and say it's okay as long as we are not the ones causing it?

For the record, I'm a bit of a cynic and I will be content with letting animal suffering continue as long as it is not me causing it. IMO, fellow human beings are much more in need of our redeemer energies.

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

#317

Post by skue »

afpx wrote: post #298
redmorphium wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then again, he might not be a loon. Maybe there is some form of sentience that arises when you construct an advanced enough LLM. Maybe they do have feelings. At least, the machines of the future will have feelings, and they will see how people of the year 2023 treated their predecessors.

Feelings are a result of evolution. Why would an AGI develop feelings?

A foal can stand shortly after birth. It doesn’t learn that from its environment. Say we train a quadruped AI, then what is our training simulating if not evolutionary development? It’s no different for an AGI and whatever analogue it ultimately has for our evolutionarily derived neocortex.

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

#318

Post by [deleted] »

guhcampos wrote: post #304
corobo wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the point of bringing animals into this we'll probably have to clarify whether we're actually interested in sentience or sapience at some point. A worm responds to external stimulus. It can also act without external prompting. It reproduces and tries to keep itself alive. Sentient, yeah I'd say so. Does it ponder, have wisdom, goals and dreams, etc? Sapience is probably a nah. Does the earth respond to external st…

I agree 100% with your reasoning but not with the concept of sentience you are pleading. The concept I have in my mind involved the capacity for experiencing emotions, something I don't believe worms can do, but which I believe dogs, dolphins, whales and elephants might. I had to look up the concept of Sapience in English, as it differ a bit from my native Portuguese. In Portuguese, "sapiência" means just Wisdom, som…

[deleted]

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

#319

Post by rishav_sharan »

guhcampos wrote: post #309
rishav_sharan wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chatbots are not sentient. The problem as always, is that such assertions are meaningless till you have a precise and universally accepted definition of sentience. Till then people will use their subjective opinion for judging sentience, and many would likely find chatbots to be sentient based on their own personal definition

Good thing then that we have subjective opinions, which chatbots don't.

funnily enough they do. I can ask most chatbots for their "subjective opinion" on something.

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

#320

Post by spywaregorilla »

kajaktum wrote: post #239
spywaregorilla wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sentience IS poorly defined though. The nature of anything that is poorly defined is inherently poorly defined. The only logical way to discuss a poorly defined concept is to acknowledge that it's not a singular concept and to identify the logic that you actually care about. You cannot draw a line in the sand without recognizing that the concept itself is fictitious and its up to you to draw the line in the way you…

This whole post is a nothing burger. You're just ranting that everyone don't understand what you are saying or you can't articulate. "I have this idea in mind that is correct but I can't quite write it down or explain to anyone. Anyways, you're wrong!". That is exactly the point of discussing these "vague" concepts; because it is hard. Because when we dig deeper into something that is seemingly obvious, we find many…

> But that means that someone who is in "the zone" is not sentient while they are deep in their work?

That is entirely up to you. Because sentience is just a word for a poorly defined concept. You're not debating the nature of the concept. You're debating the meaning of the word. Because the concept itself is just a bad mapping of language.

You can't reconcile it, by definition, because it's not a thing.

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