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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

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Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#471

Post by pyinstallwoes »

srvmshr wrote: post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers…

Perhaps the problem is how we model sentience. Perhaps the default should be everything is sentient but limited to the interface that exists as boundary conditions.

To say otherwise is almost the path to sure error, and many terrible historic events have happened in that vicinity of categorization what is and isn't.

Perhaps we should go by what sentience means. To feel. A being that feels. To feel is to respond to a vibration in some way. That is to say, anything that has a signal is sentient in some way.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#472

Post by b112 »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #456
fragmede wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone’s focusing on that because they want to discuss the interesting bit - is it sentient. What you’re pointing out is true, but not really interesting to discuss because everyone already knows that and it’s not that controversial. (For limited values of everyone. Obvi not all readers actually know that.) I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for…

Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient. I don't know why this is interesting. Someone said a dumb thing, breached their contract, and got fired for it. The end.

I'd say, depending on job, the incompetence and lack of analytical thinking displayed by thinking sentience is present, is a reason for dismissal alone.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#473

Post by spion »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #456
fragmede wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone’s focusing on that because they want to discuss the interesting bit - is it sentient. What you’re pointing out is true, but not really interesting to discuss because everyone already knows that and it’s not that controversial. (For limited values of everyone. Obvi not all readers actually know that.) I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for…

Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient. I don't know why this is interesting. Someone said a dumb thing, breached their contract, and got fired for it. The end.

Why would code running on a computer be unable to become sentient?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#474

Post by laserlight »

srvmshr wrote: post #452
laserlight wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commenter I previously replied to has a PhD in those “other” fields, yet I haven’t seen a falsifiable definition of sentience made by them. As a field of study, sentience has been a topic of philosophy more than ML. That’s why top-level comment’s claim of having a PhD in “this domain” is not apt. Comparative quality of studies in different domains is a different question.

I did. Each one of these dimensions can be independently evaluated. > Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience), decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. > comment’s claim of having a PhD in “this domain” is not apt C'mon, thats being disingenuous. People spent years por…

Can you describe how you test for independent thinking? What does independent mean anyways? A decision tree can rationalize its outcomes. Does it count towards sentience? Is there an academic source for this definition of sentience?

> Telling this extra information is just communicating we spent enough time on it to give somewhat informed discussion.

Doing so is appeal to authority. When there is a claim of authority, it's very natural for it to be questioned. And those questions are based on subjective perception of authority.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#475

Post by School-Cotton »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #456
fragmede wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone’s focusing on that because they want to discuss the interesting bit - is it sentient. What you’re pointing out is true, but not really interesting to discuss because everyone already knows that and it’s not that controversial. (For limited values of everyone. Obvi not all readers actually know that.) I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for…

Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient. I don't know why this is interesting. Someone said a dumb thing, breached their contract, and got fired for it. The end.

> Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient.

We have no agreed-upon definition of what sentience even is, nor what causes humans to experience it, so this is clearly not true.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#476

Post by slewis »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #456
fragmede wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone’s focusing on that because they want to discuss the interesting bit - is it sentient. What you’re pointing out is true, but not really interesting to discuss because everyone already knows that and it’s not that controversial. (For limited values of everyone. Obvi not all readers actually know that.) I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for…

Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient. I don't know why this is interesting. Someone said a dumb thing, breached their contract, and got fired for it. The end.

“Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient,” said the temporarily coherent chemical blob.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#477

Post by asimpletune »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #456
fragmede wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone’s focusing on that because they want to discuss the interesting bit - is it sentient. What you’re pointing out is true, but not really interesting to discuss because everyone already knows that and it’s not that controversial. (For limited values of everyone. Obvi not all readers actually know that.) I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for…

Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient. I don't know why this is interesting. Someone said a dumb thing, breached their contract, and got fired for it. The end.

>[...] code running on a computer cannot become sentient

If you could prove that, you'd win a Turing Award.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#478

Post by andrewchambers »

aikendrum wrote: post #446
ChadNauseam wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Issue is that we don’t need it to explain humans either. Most people think that a human is sentient and a rock isn’t – but humans and rocks are both atoms bouncing around, so you need an explanation for what’s different. I think most physicists think that if you started with a description of the positions and velocities etc of all the particles in a human, and put them into a supercomputer the size of the moon, and h…

> I think most physicists think that if you started with a description of the positions and velocities etc of all the particles in a human, and put them into a supercomputer the size of the moon, and had the computer run a simulation using the standard model, then the simulated human would act identically to a real human. Just created a throwaway to reply to this. As a trained therapist (currently working in another…

The post said they simulated the universe (or you could assume just the parts close to earth), it would be simulating everything a human would interact with. I don't see the point this reply was trying to make.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#479

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

mongol wrote: post #443
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already have, and I'm considering trying it out with my own cat at some point. Cats are way more intelligent than people give them credit for, I agree. But I think you can get very far without the ability to turn the mind's eye inward, and I don't think it's controversial to state that cats don't have a great deal of self-awareness and metacognitive ability. Neosocial insects like ants are amazing indeed. I often w…

> And, to quote Oliver Sachs: "I'm not sure about octopuses..." I thought this quote was about the octopus that correctly predicted the outcome of games in a FIFA world cup. But seems it was something else?

Oliver said this during a roundtable discussion on metaphysics with Daniel Dennet, Steve Gould, Rupert Sheldrake, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Toulmin from 1993.

It's a fascinating discussion with a lot of my favourite mid-late 20th century thinkers. It's up on youtube, lookup any of the names involved with "roundtable discussion". It's over 3 hours long though.

Anyway, Oliver was talking about what kind of mind he imagined various animals having. And that was most of what he had to say on octopuses.

It's a bit of a sad watch too because all the participants except Dennet and Sheldrake are dead now.

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