441–450 of 694 posts
But I think he believes sentience is coming at some point, and he thinks that society as a whole needs to be more involved in making these decisions instead of giving private companies all the power.
By suggesting we are ALREADY dealing with sentience, he is bringing attention and urgency to the issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're really handicapped by a lack of definition, here. Let's try this: what would it take, no matter how outlandish or unlikely, for you to be completely convinced that a particular chat bot demonstrates full sentience? I think for me, it would never be able to fully demonstrate sentience to my satisfaction, because even people cannot. I have to take it on faith, philosophically speaking, that you are sentient, for…
I don’t think that’s an interesting question at all and misses the point completely. We have no idea, what causes the sensation of subjective experience. Assuming that sentience is no more complex than our current level of understanding is arrogant. Furthermore, it’s just plain useless; without a fundamental theory of sentience with both predictive and explanatory power, our understanding can’t grow.
Agreed.
> Assuming that sentience is no more complex than our current level of understanding is arrogant.
Agreed. I'm assuming nothing. Given that we don't know what causes the sensation of experience (nor even that it has any real meaning or use), in my opinion, the assumption that it cannot possibly involve "Markov chains" is arrogant.
> Furthermore, it’s just plain useless; without a fundamental theory of sentience with both predictive and explanatory power, our understanding can’t grow.
Well, sure. It could be that sentience doesn't have any scientific relevance at all. Questions regarding it may belong to a different magisteria altogether.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > 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.
The odd thing that kept going through my head while reading is that if I replaced LaMDA with , it wouldn’t read much differently. E.G. “Strings together phrases, but it doesn’t have a clue what it’s talking about”. Sounds like the bar for “intelligence” is actually higher than that which we normally encounter IRL.
I'm really happy that large language models are forcing us to reconsider these questions. I don't think we can be sure of the sentience of anything other than ourselves, almost by definition. Having said that, I go about my life _assuming_ that the other humans I encounter are sentient. At what point will we have enough evidence to _assume_ that AI is sentient? P.S. I am not arguing that LaMDA is sentient. I don't th…
1. Continuity of input: The AI needs to be constantly "on", constantly receiving input of some sort, and constantly able to produce output, rather than being strictly limited to producing discrete responses to discrete stimuli.
2. Continuity of learning: In addition, the AI needs to be continually update its "mental model" of the world—in effect, constantly "learning" and re-training its neural network on the input it receives.
Now, again, these are not sufficient for an AI to be conscious by our understanding of consciousness. But I, personally, believe they are both necessary for it to be even worth starting to consider whether a given AI might be.
I also believe that unless we start in that direction extremely deliberately and with the intention of making something as human-like as possible, the first AIs that have some remote chance of being worthy of being considered "conscious" will not have a consciousness that we can easily recognize, because they will not be based in anything like the same kinds of fundamentals that we are...but that's likely a different discussion for a different day.
Of course it is not. But there's a bigger issue here. Having read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slac…
“One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf.” This is spot on. The danger is not from the AI themselves. The danger is from people’s reactions to the AI’s. I remember seeing a Boston Dynamics video years ago where they kicked their robot to test stability. The video was littered with comments sympathizing with the robot because it moves in a lifel…
It would be wise for /policymakers/ to pause and take this human reaction seriously... Education!... Lucidity in the population...
You are reminding of the reactions from a YT-type crowd, "Do not hurt the robot!"; nearby a member notes "is that the profile of a senior FAANG engineer?"... The elephant in the room is flashing: we must assess Natural Intelligence as a problem well before Artificial Intelligence!
Also nonsense.
Of course it is not. But there's a bigger issue here. Having read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slac…
We're already there. A couple of years ago Bradesco, a large Brazilian bank, programmed its bot to talk back to abusers. Instead of "sorry, I don't understand", it says things like "don't talk to me like that"
https://www.trendwatching.com/innovation-of-the-day-brazilia...
- Understanding of the passage of time
- Independent activity, without prompts
- Has self understanding of it's current inputs, like a camera
I don't think that's a full list, but to me the transcription really indicates that LaMDA responds to user prompts with reasonably relevant responses, but it gives me no indication that the system has a self awareness.
I think a good test would be to ask it the same non-mathematical question several times in a row, and see if there is any awareness of the same question, or if the answer change. Like if I asked LaMDA it's favorite color, can it name a color, and tell me that answer consistently? Does it know that I've already asked it, and give answers that seem frustrated after a while?
On 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 t…
I've tweeted Ex Machina as an example on this issue, and all the way through that movie, Ava was not sentient. It's an illusion and I think it's just hubris that some people in this field think "consciousness" is something that can be electronically replicated or identified. You can't identify the exterior color of a box if you're by definition trapped inside of it.
Seems much more likely to me that the real hubris is this exact sentiment, that we are in some way special and therefore creating artificial consciousness is impossible.
Of course it is not. But there's a bigger issue here. Having read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slac…
While a lot of us knew this not everyone did. One girl with a dragon nickname joined as she did nearly every evening. I don't remember if she approached the not or the other way around.
For about one to one and a half hour we watched as she chatted up the bot. A few of us were together in the same room in a Lan party style and couldn't believe she would not realize that she was not talking to a bot. But on that evening she really had no clue.
A friend of hers also moving in the same circle of people told us the next day said girl even told her about the chat with this new nickname.
She only learned it was a bot when she came visiting our weekend lam session that evening.
While I though it funny while watching this chat experience gave me the creeps back than as to how easily we all could be fooled by intelligently designed machines. I never forgot and while it still makes an interesting story to tell I never quite was able to shake the feeling I watched a bit of dystopian future back in the day.