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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

bigtechnology.substack.com

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Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#491

Post by jstanley »

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.

This is very much not "known". Some people believe it, but nobody knows.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#492

Post by pyinstallwoes »

Wow at

> Lemoine maintains that Google has been treating AI ethicists like code debuggers when they should be seen as the interface between technology and society. Gabriel, the Google spokesperson, said Lemoine is a software engineer, not an ethicist.

From https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#493

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

dekhn wrote: post #36
kareemsabri wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...

I don't think he was ever really a practioner in the field- more like a SWE who transferred to an ML group and got delusions of grandeur.

I literally hired him in Google Summer of Code to create an ML project.

Most people have no clue who Blake Lemoine is and are making up stories, pretending like their hot takes are deep insight.

Many people are doing with Blake Lemoine what they claim LaMDA is doing with anything: consuming symbols and spitting them back out in some order without understanding what they actually mean.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#494

Post by jstanley »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #481
zarzavat wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models Can the magic of the human brain not also be attributed to "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" as well, aka learning ? > 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 gave garbled outp…

> Google's model exceeds average human performance on >50% of language tasks I guess I'm just not interested, or worried, in a model that can beat the average human performance. That's an astoundingly low bar. Let me know when it can outperform experts in meaningful language tasks.

This is a great example of the "moving goalposts" of AI.

100 years ago, a comment like yours would have sounded absurd.

There was a time when we didn't have any models that could beat any human's performance in any task.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#495

Post by DonHopkins »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #307
nkrisc wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the smartest people in the world are still human and susceptible to all human failings and illnesses.

And drugs. Let's be honest. This whole thing smells a lot like drugs.

Religion is the opiate of the masses.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#496

Post by smilespray »

mberning wrote: post #44
jeffparsons wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "practitioner of the field" counts for much in this case. In reading his open letter, it was pretty apparent that he'd well and truly crossed over from thinking about the situation rationally into the realm of "I want to believe". If you ask enough practitioners in any given field the same question, you're nearly guaranteed to eventually get a super wonky response from one of them. The specific field do…

There is a saying “two of a trade seldom agree”.

Interesting. I looked it up, and it feels like it's the precursor to not invented here syndrome.

https://www.proz.com/kudoz/english-to-turkish/general-conver...

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#497

Post by heavyset_go »

mjburgess wrote: post #461
zarzavat wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models Can the magic of the human brain not also be attributed to "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" as well, aka learning ? > 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 gave garbled outp…

>"large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" as well, aka learning No, experimentation is an act on the world to set its state and then measure it. That's what learning involves. These machines do not act on the world, they just capture correlations. In this sense, machines are maximally schizophrenic. They answer "yes" to "is there a cat on the matt?" not because there is one, but because "yes" was what they he…

Well said.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#498

Post by jstanley »

srvmshr wrote: post #442
ekianjo wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone with a PhD in this domain you dont need to use phd credentials to have an opinion on this matter

Yes, absolutely. But then I risk getting sounded vainly opinionated, especially on HN without basis if I don't give a disclaimer that I have spent half a decade working on these specific things. Too often, people get called out for no reason. And that sometimes hurt. (If I was credentials hopping I would rather put a longer list of illustrious institutions, co-authors and awards, just saying. I am not - its just just…

This is just a (not even) thinly-veiled appeal to authority.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but your credentials don't make you right.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#499

Post by LQDH »

briga wrote: post #48

Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)

The only thing that we can know 100% for certain is "I think therefore I am" or probably better worded "I am experiencing something therefore something must exist that can experience things". There are a lot of definitions of consciousness and sentience but I think the best one is talking about the "I experience" or the "I think" in those sentences.

All of our beliefs and knowledge, including belief that the world is real must be built on top "I think therefore I am". It seems weird to throw away the one thing we know is 100% true, because of something that is derived (science, real world observations) from that true thing.

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