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This fails the brain-in-vat test. Put mine in one, give it the exact same signals, and I’m still sentient and will experience hunger even without a stomach. Or even without the science fiction: people with amputated limbs frequently report phantom itches on them.
How can you possibly know this? Has your brain been in a vat?
It matters not if it has an inner life, all that matters is if can mimic your intelligence enough to put you out of a job and make your masters think your life is no longer relevant.
I’ve built transformer tech myself and it’s pretty clear how attention technology mimics reasoning. And how with more realtime inputs plus reflection it will be able to mimic goal orientation and motivations.
It may not need to be alive to replace us.
This fails the brain-in-vat test. Put mine in one, give it the exact same signals, and I’m still sentient and will experience hunger even without a stomach. Or even without the science fiction: people with amputated limbs frequently report phantom itches on them.
How can you possibly know this? Has your brain been in a vat?
So 'know': no, no one knows what it's actually like to be a brain in the vat... but it's a reasonably good guess that you might experience something like this.
Nice that at least, the authors are trying to define a practical test for sentience, and do not remain in the subjective realm. There are 2 problems though: 1. If an actor says "I am hungry" during a theater play, he is not reporting his internal state, but merely playing along. The LLM might always be in a "play along" mode, and have its own thoughts (which it keeps to itself) about its situation. It might also not…
The LLM doesn't exist if I remove the power cable / hit it with Ctrl+C in terminal?
> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red. Why is it essential? I get that an LLM saying "I am hungry" has no feeling of hunger, it's stringing words together without the experience behind them. But does it need to? Give it a robot body to move around and…
I agree with you. LLMs seem to be proof that general intelligence doesn't require sentience. I do think that there is an important moral distinction between sentient beings and not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking purely philosophicaly if you cloned a person, fed them memories, asked them a question and then killed them right after, would they not be sentient? It's really quite hard to come up with simple tests like these.
Indeed, though I'm not clear on your deiknymi, it's quite hard to determine sentience. IMHO the Turing test has not aged well, and is insufficient to really answer the question; It's now quite possible to make something that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, etc, but that is clearly, on close inspection, not actually a duck.
"According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion."
> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red. Why is it essential? I get that an LLM saying "I am hungry" has no feeling of hunger, it's stringing words together without the experience behind them. But does it need to? Give it a robot body to move around and…
I agree with you. LLMs seem to be proof that general intelligence doesn't require sentience. I do think that there is an important moral distinction between sentient beings and not.
This of course has always been cruel to disabled people and we’ve just ignored along with ignoring them.
But when the tables turn and humanity is out thought by machines we may reconsider the last 300 years of philosophy.
I see the argument goes both ways.
One is that they will have to invent other arguments against their newly created fully embodied robots being "sentient".
The other is that I feel strongly against equating general intelligence with a subjective experience of being able to "see red". Though I'm going to ignore this point here. Instead, I would like to ask, does "sentience" only belong to animals?
General intelligence involves problem-solving, learning, and adaptation, whereas subjective experiences are about personal, qualitative states. This distinction is crucial.
This seems just like a single argument and counter argument against the sentience (or lack thereof) of AI today. I feel like the article lacks some broader views on the nature of sentience, and is quite narrow in its approach Although, in fairness, I probably wouldn’t make a much better case for either of the sides
> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences... Sentience is a crucial step on the road to general intelligence. This also... not substantiated.