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Today's AI Isn't Sentient

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Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#41

Post by throwup238 »

stvltvs wrote: post #38
JaggedJax wrote: post #27

To me a more important part of sentience is a continuous existence. Today's AI is still very discrete. It exists and then it does not, repeated. Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep. A mostly always-on streaming style architecture where the model is continuously fed input and sensory data and always processing it, whether or not it is being asked a question,…

Seems like an arbitrary criterion. Human beings' conscious experience is interrupted by deep sleep every night.

Until we have a coherent definition of intelligence and sentience, everything is going to be an arbitrary criterion.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#43

Post by nijuashi »

“”” When I conclude that you are experiencing hunger when you say “I’m hungry,” my conclusion is based on a large cluster of circumstances.”””

Giving a machine a sensation of hunger may not be the wisest road to AGI for humanity. Just saying.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#44

Post by JohnFen »

Ukv wrote: post #39
JohnFen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alan Turing himself didn't propose "the Turing Test" as an actually meaningful test. It was just a thought experiment he called "the imitation game". "According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/

> Alan Turing himself didn't propose "the Turing Test" as an actually meaningful test It was the wording "can machines think" that Turing considered ambiguous due to varying opinions on how to define "think". He proposed the experiment specifically as a less ambigious replacement - I think it's entirely wrong to say that he did not intend it to be meaningful.

> He proposed the thought experiment specifically as a less ambigious replacement

Yes, Turing's issue with the question is really the same as mine: we don't really know what we mean when we say something or someone "can think". That means that the question cannot be answered because we don't know what the question is. "What is the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything?" ... "42".

What I'm saying is that Turing didn't propose the imitation game as a test for whether a machine can think at all. He proposed it in the hopes of redirecting the question to one that is both answerable and meaningful -- but it's a different question than "can a machine think?".

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#45

Post by stvltvs »

throwup238 wrote: post #41
stvltvs wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like an arbitrary criterion. Human beings' conscious experience is interrupted by deep sleep every night.

Until we have a coherent definition of intelligence and sentience, everything is going to be an arbitrary criterion.

Even with coherent definitions, it may be impossible to test for sentience with any degree of certainty.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#46

Post by ben_w »

ta2112 wrote: post #37
JaggedJax wrote: post #27

To me a more important part of sentience is a continuous existence. Today's AI is still very discrete. It exists and then it does not, repeated. Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep. A mostly always-on streaming style architecture where the model is continuously fed input and sensory data and always processing it, whether or not it is being asked a question,…

> Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep. This describes me! I wake up, do a bunch of stuff, and then go back to sleep.

I wonder how many token-equivalents (including visual and internal) I experience between sleeps…

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#47

Post by kaibee »

ben_w wrote: post #5

> 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…

> it doesn't say why a camera responding to a 550 nm photon isn't seeing red when your retina is.

It isn't your retina 'seeing' red. The retina is just translating it to the rest of the brain. When we replace eyes with silicon-based cameras (poorly, not in color, low resolution, but still) the patient experiences seeing again. Or going the other way, when you have a dream and see something red in that dream, you experience* (or at least, you have the memory of experiencing it) the qualia despite having your eyes closed and being asleep.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#48

Post by JaggedJax »

stvltvs wrote: post #38
JaggedJax wrote: post #27

To me a more important part of sentience is a continuous existence. Today's AI is still very discrete. It exists and then it does not, repeated. Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep. A mostly always-on streaming style architecture where the model is continuously fed input and sensory data and always processing it, whether or not it is being asked a question,…

Seems like an arbitrary criterion. Human beings' conscious experience is interrupted by deep sleep every night.

Hence the "mostly" portion of my post. You do not answer single questions and then pause your brain until some taps you to asks another. During your waking hours you are processing data non-stop (you even are during sleep really). If you processed data for a second and then paused without any activity for minutes between each question, I would say you likely do not have sentience as you would not have the time to consider anything outside that single question.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#49

Post by lores »

tsunamifury wrote: post #28
slibhb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We may learn that the great mistake of the enlightenment era was as defining our human worth by our ability to think. 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 don't think that's true. While it's a valued characteristic, society also respects athletes, cooks, nurses, or businessmen, none of them because of their thinking capacity. The people who assign the most worth to intelligence are people who value their own, so there is a bias inside our bubble.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#50

Post by 0xfeba »

raldi wrote: post #8

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.

I don't think you can generalize it like that. Hunger comes from signals originating in your stomach. Without a stomach, you're brain would lose energy -- and I'd wager the symptoms would be more like oxygen deprivation than "hunger".
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