301–310 of 694 posts
I agree with the take that LaMDA is not sentient (not even close). But I think the excessive smack-down of excitement is a little patronizing of the public. Even if they don't know what to do with them, big language models now have internal states that correspond to high level human abstractions like "life" or "love" or "master plan". To be able to create a master plan, you must first be able to represent the concept…
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> it will respond with its best interpretation of the information it is given, just like a human would The reason I can respond to this reply is not because I have read and memorised reams of text of people talking about AI and am simply regurgitating it mindlessly. I am able to do it because I can consider the points you are making, and what their actual 'meaning' is, try to come up with my own meaningful response a…
Right for sure, I'm just trying to get to a better argument. I definitely agree that there's a great deal more consideration in your comment than in one that GPT-3 would come up with. I do wonder how far these language models can be pushed. GPT-3 seems to formulate rich models of reality to be able to extract/derive information needed to construct these answers. When I hurt your pride by suggesting you haven't fully…
I feel like I am capable of making a concrete decision about whether I agree with two opposing ideas in a way that a language model can't do, such as this discussion. Furthermore my belief is consistent in my outputs day to day until my mind is changed by something. If that i some complete illusion and I am just a slightly fancier autocomplete than GPT-3 - well I'd be surprised, but I can't claim to understand consciousness well enough to refute it.
I'm still struggling with the question "what is sentience". Are insects sentient? If so, could we build less intelligent but sentient AI, on par with insects? If so, is it unethical to torture such intelligence for fun in simulations? If we can define or create something as "minimal sentient", the following discussion on ethics would be more clear - since now people are talking past each other with completely differe…
To my knowledge only humans and some species of monkeys are referred to as sentient. So I imagine insects aren't, at least when applying the general definition.
But my point is people seem to assume sentience is a byproduct of high level intelligence, which might not be true. Maybe we need to focus more on "what is sentient", "what makes a sentient thing sentient" first and discover the basic elements of sentience.
If we can formally define sentience, or reverse-engineering sentience, or build a "MVP" or "bare-minimal" sentience. Thing would be much easier discuss.
Here are some random thoughts: Self-awareness might be a consequence of evolution - it might be more optimal to grow self-awareness than other perks to survive. Just like occasionally using reflection in programming could solve hard problems elegantly. Sentience and emotions might also be consequences of evolution - they can be seen as efficient and power tools to communicate, people can efficiently affect a lot of people with their emotion, without conveying rationally by words.
Here's a random idea: Build a complex simulation game, but with relatively simple creations with some evolving capability. If we try to manipulate the environment enough to let self-awareness and emotions to be optimal solution.
It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…
Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before. Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what? Silence. It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of lone…
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> This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. But is it all that we do? And how do you know? It seems too simplistic to be taken at face value that statistics, randomness and pattern matching would be the only ingredients necessary for intelligence and sentience.
> It seems too simplistic to be taken at face value that statistics, randomness and pattern matching would be the only ingredients necessary for intelligence and sentience. I'm afraid that's the crux of it. What if that's all it were? What if all that were necessary for intelligence and sentience were statistics, randomness and pattern matching? It is kind of a cosmically terrifying thought, possibly prompting danger…
Our understanding of the world reflects our modelling of the world. Empirical science models the world in terms of probabilities, and this, by necessity, makes everything look like a Markov chain.
But “the map is not the territory”, as the saying goes.
I’m not implying, nor do I believe that there’s any sort of magic going on, but if Markov chains are all that is needed for sentience, then what isn’t sentient? Panpsychists would certainly be having a field day.
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Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before. Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what? Silence. It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of lone…
I went to high school with Blake and I completely can see him acting in bad faith. One of the guys in our physics class got so tired of Blake's nonsense that he tried to kick him in the head several times before class. I'm not condoning that type of behavior but I could see why that happened.
>One other trait of my that will help is my ability to use emotions
>Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company
They were not written by a computer program, but a grifter.
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To take that a step further, why couldn't such an AI periodically generate questions to ask itself? Being good at generating questions, could become almost as important as answering them.
Would it be posible to run two instances of it and have them talk to each other?
However, to make it more human-like, I would think they would make some type of AI self reflection. So like we can talk and think out problems to ourselves, perhaps they would have the AI periodically practice questioning itself, when humans are not around or asking it questions, and do some form of self-analysis.
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It’s not doing anything without the prompt. It requires the prompt to fall through the network nodes to generate the next response. The bird example doesn’t translate, it’s the wrong criteria. Like assuming that the ability to respond comprehensively equals sentience. When even perfect replies and activity without prompts could just be a p-zombie
Doesn't that get rendered moot if we happen to continually pass "stimulus" to the network? Technically we as humans don't do much either if not given a stimulus, just that we happen to have our eyes and other senses continuously giving us one. Maybe we should train these bots to also respond to empty or non input?
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Defining the term is hard. So hard in fact, that no one has managed to do it in millennia (it's not as if this question is new). We can, however, use proxies to get around the problem. Just like "life", "species", or "time" - all of which are surprisingly poorly defined and might not even exist in strictest sense - there are ways to work with terms without having a waterproof definition for them. No matter the set of…
> Defining the term is hard. So hard in fact, that no one has managed to do it in millennia (it's not as if this question is new). Indeed! It's almost like any statement about sentience pro or con is unfalsifiable, to be accepted or rejected according to faith. Each of us two, ourselves, could insist that the other is not (or is) sentient, but neither of us could objectively prove it. We humans all just have to decid…
I have to disagree with you there. While it's indeed a question of faith (i.e. unscientific) to give a definite positive answer - or rather that a positive answer depends on a an arbitrarily chosen set of criteria - the opposite is simply not true.
More formally put: making a positive claim would require a sufficient condition that has to be met. I agree that such condition/criterion doesn't exists (yet). Required conditions, however, do exist. Sentience in any scientific sense requires the ability to actively perceive- and interact with the environment, as well as a physical mechanism for processing and storing information.
So we can definitely rule out rocks being sentient, for example. On the other hand, depending on the set of criteria you chose, you may or may not classify a sophisticated chatbot as sentient. It'd be sufficient to present such set of testable criteria and apply them to the system under test. Whether you or I accept these criteria as being sufficient, is another question entirely and indeed not a scientific one.