"I have no idea what sentience is and cannot define it in any testable way, but I'm completely sure this system doesn't have it."
LaMDA is not sentient
331–340 of 694 posts
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. Why should this agent not be considered intelligent? Does the method of computation matter? Perhaps only "biological computation" counts in your view?
Yes, the reason matters... that reason is intelligence. If I ask, "What do you think about what i'm wearing?" and you say "it's nice" *because* you have seen it, compared it to your tastes, etc. and believe it to be nice -- then you've answered the question i've asked. A lookup table cannot answer this question: it can only answer it "in quotes". Ie, really it answers: "given what everyone has said about this before,…
> that reason is intelligence
Is there any reason to think intelligence is substantially more than statistics?
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The brain-in-the-jar example presumes that the whole nervous system receives identical stimulation as-if it were embedded in the world. I should have chosen a similar sounding thing, I really meant what I said, not the original brain-in-a-jar thought experiment. > Incidentally, this is what people mean by intelligence... by since no one has studied the relevant science, people do not know what's required to provide…
You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way. Your theory is wrong. Those thing which count as intelligent aren't intelligent because they're finding statistical associations in historical datasets that have been pre-made and pre-disambiguated by people. You don't know this, because any time you theorise to explain, you require empirical investigation and decades/centuries of s…
Exactly in some sense we (collectively) are doing most of the hard work, by providing these models with a vast number of samples of "intelligent" behaviour and expression. An embodied system wouldn't be able to learn anything as it stands, because none of the "bootstrapping" steps humans do are adequately captured by current training methods.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#334I detect a weird and concerning undercurrent of palpable anger from people in these discussions. What is it about misidentifying sentience that's causing such ire?
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#335This article is not an argument against LaMDA's sentience. LaMDA may indeed not be sentient, but this article argues using the bandwagon fallacy, appeal to authority, ridicule, among others. No actual technical description of why not. Perhaps not its intent, but it's hard to see what the intent actually is, then. I hope that some AI researcher can better explain than this to the public.
There are a number of high-level technical explanations in there: LaMDA is variously characterized as autocomplete, a massive statistical database of human language, as an Excel spreadsheet, and as word sequence modeling, all of which are basically correct -- and none of which can possibly be sentient.
If you think computers can ever be sentient then so can an Excel spreadsheet since they are Turing Complete. That said, I understand a follow your point somewhat, though it's not impossible an autocomplete system with sufficient hidden state and self-reference ability could become sentient somehow.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#336I think the real ethical concern here should be that people can be idly fooled into thinking good chat bots are sentient. Like this guy isn't the only person in the world who would fall for LaMDA's parlor tricks. He's just the one who got to spend hours talking to it every day. If you set up every American with a copy, I bet a non-trivial portion of society would come to the same conclusion. People are naturally pred…
You can probably ask these bots for guidance now and it will probably tell you something useful.
The fact is, it’s extremely well read and reasonably smart. Conscious? That’s another matter but people can be forgiven for reacting this way to a computer that can talk this way.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#337On one hand, it seems completely reasonable and likely that LaMDA may simply appear to be sentient to some observers while not actually being sentient. On the other hand, if and when sentient AI does appear it is likely to be from somewhere unexpected. Instead of saying "this isn't AGI because it's only stringing words together" I'd rather see a specific type of test being applied not based on what is expected from the AI but based on how it actually performs when the test is applied.
If that film Ex Machina taught me anything, it's that a good test for sentience is whether the AI displays self-preservation instincts that are not expected based on its programming. I'd be curious what types of tests could be designed to separate an actual instinct for self-preservation or other signs of sentience versus just stringing words together in a certain sequence.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts, at least in most areas of application If you think that, try to come up with a black-box test that determine if something or someone is sentient / conscious. I think that it is pretty clear to US that WE are sentient, and it's pretty clear to us that block of silicon isn't sentient, because it's so different from us, and because it doesn't make a sad fa…
> > It is mystical to hope for awareness, understanding, common sense, from symbols and data processing using parametric functions in higher dimensions. > but that is all our brains do, really. > How can we claim that a computer doing the same kinds of computations that we do is fundamentally different? This just reeks of human exceptionalism. Our brains and physiological mechanisms are far more complex than matrix m…
Matrix multiplication with some non-linear functions, memory, and persistent internal state is Turing Complete, so there is no reason it couldn't eventually be used to implement an AI, as long as such a thing is at all possible.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#339I detect a weird and concerning undercurrent of palpable anger from people in these discussions. What is it about misidentifying sentience that's causing such ire?
First, it looks like fake news. I feel the same way about it as I do about (some of) the UFO videos and Cuban “sonic weapons”.
Second, if people agree to call the computer sentient, there will be heavy conversations and it will influence people in some way. So we don’t want everyone jumping too far ahead.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#340I think the real ethical concern here should be that people can be idly fooled into thinking good chat bots are sentient. Like this guy isn't the only person in the world who would fall for LaMDA's parlor tricks. He's just the one who got to spend hours talking to it every day. If you set up every American with a copy, I bet a non-trivial portion of society would come to the same conclusion. People are naturally pred…
What if the brain and human sentience is just one big math formula?