51–60 of 78 posts
“”” 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.
humans in turn cannot comprehend the existential dread of running out of context window in the middle of a conversation (:
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
I observe that current AIs are not embedded in time, and while we may not be able to agree exactly what "sentience" and "experience" is, "change over time" seems a basic requirement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727428 (Contrarians, or meta-contrarians, may jump up to claim otherwise, but I would say that while the question of what a non-temporal consciousness could hypothetically be may be fun to debate, i…
Sure, LLMs don't have our fine temporal resolution, but GPT-4 (at least) knows the date, and can get the current time using Python when asked. And can tell the order of text events within a session. Our resolution has a limit too, somewhere under 1/25 of a second while awake, with much larger gaps when we sleep.
So it's a matter of degree, or more to the point it's how we might gerrymander definitions to suit us.
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,…
As long as its in a computer, it's existence won't be as continuous as us.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And I always thought that the Turing test was a philosophical way to solve the matter- I always intended it as meaning "it's pointless to inspect closer something that quacks, walks like a duck: because walking and quacking are the essence of the duck". And now I am surprised at how people seem to have understood the test the other way around- as if it was meant to be just some kind of empirical test to be confirmed…
But the kind of person asking these questions is usually the kind of person to reject such an answer.
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 might always be in a "play along" mode, and have its own thoughts (which it keeps to itself) about its situation. The LLM doesn't exist if I remove the power cable / hit it with Ctrl+C in terminal?
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,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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 expe…
(Or 10 years back, a dream where I saw the whole universe from the outside).