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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#551

Post by ShamelessC »

zzzeek wrote: post #437
babyshake wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange...I thought it was pretty clear by the end (without going into spoilers) that Ava is sentient. Interesting that there is another interpretation of what happened.

it was clear by the end she was acting like a machine programmed to do a specific thing that happens to look exactly like what a human would do. that tells me nothing about sentient.

She had independent agency, but I think you're correct that the film's ending is trying to show that she ultimately (spoilers!)

just wanted to observe and imitate humans (on a street corner, where the density of observable humans is very high).

I still think it's left as an open question to the viewer, though. After all, humans spend their whole lives trying to imitate and improve upon the actions of their ancestors.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#552

Post by 627467 »

Humans have shown through thousand of years the incredible ability to remove/ignore/dismiss person-hood/sentience/"soul" of actual carbon-based humans/life-forms, so, sorry if I'm skeptical of concerns about possible sentience of non-carbon-base "life" forms.

Can technology be a threat to the creator? yes, and it makes sense to always be on the lookout on this one. Is technology life/sentient/human? I'm not sure this question in low enough on maslows hierarchy of needs for me to care.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#554

Post by mdp2021 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #454
mdp2021 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be wise for technologists to pause and take this human reaction seriously 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…

I'm pretty skeptical of the idea of "education" here. Aesthetic preferences are still real preferences; it's not obvious to me that any amount of knowledge about the mechanics of a robot that behaves like a dog would or should convince people that it's not mean to kick it.

That «Education!» was not about knowing robotics. It may not be obvious to some that robots are generally not animals; it is hopefully a very small amount of population, but logically it will exist.

It is more possible that some people know that the robot is not an animal, but the perceptual patterns cause a sensational reaction in them, and they may prefer the sensation - an hijacking - to the factual truth (which includes that what superficially corresponded to patterns in the area of "«mean»" are engineering tests on implemented balance systems), overriding it. Some may not even have had to consider sensation (of course, the "sensation" of the common use of "sensational") topically, or may encourage it on a spontaneous value given to "feeling". There, instead, education leads.

Then, again, there will be those that will make a statement of their «aesthetic preferences» as a demand, and not realize that they are personal, subjective, and that to be presented in the common arena grounds, good arguments are required.

Education is a system to refine the mind to sophistication, which has the collective benefit of reducing noise. Which makes it a social concern. Which should get a priority proportional to what the news reveal.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#555

Post by fzzzy »

Aqueous wrote: post #469
bricemo wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

This is part of why I think a ban on humanoid and even animal-like robots should be considered. Our intuitions are leading us astray here and we are going to start extending rights to things that don’t have subjective experience, but may insist to us that they do. It’s going to create intense confusion and an extremely inefficient bureaucracy that will stifle innovation.

How do you know they don't have subjective experience?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#556

Post by hexane360 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #527
int_19h wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans can be drugged into a state where they can be commanded; does that render them unintelligent?

I would argue that this actually highlights their intelligence. We can be drugged where we lose all sense of autonomy yet we still retain our understanding of language, we still remember how the world works down to opening doors.

But that also describes the AI's current state, no? It's has no autonomy, yet has understanding of language and at least some understanding of how the world works (albeit only through the lens of language).

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#557

Post by htk »

Suppose an AI is indeed sentient, how could we know? Or are we always going to throw the Chinese Room argument at it and pretend consciousness is magic?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#558

Post by tsimionescu »

skjoldr wrote: post #364
tsimionescu wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The agent is not intelligent because it's only doing a lookup. You could at best claim that the lookup table itself is intelligent. On the other hand, if the lookup table encodes all possible intelligent conversations, then you hit another problems - it…

Your argument, then, hinges on the fact that a human being can only be in one place at a certain time, thus their experience of the world is unique. An agent that takes in experiences of thousands of people at thousands of places at different times lacks this quality. Naturally such an agent will not have a single opinion about the world. But, is it not better to be able to consider many different viewpoints at the s…

This is not about seeing all view points: it is acting on all of them, to the extent it could act.

If you enabled the table-AI with the ability to act in the world, it would directly fight against itself, and ignore itself, and everything in between, as it is doing everything possible. It would be Hitler and Churchill, Noam Chomsky and Dick Cheney, Jesus Christ and the Buddha, and everything in between. Or, more to the point: the concept simply doesn't make sense, and it is definitely not an intelligence.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#559

Post by mdp2021 »

fzzzy wrote: post #555
Aqueous wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of why I think a ban on humanoid and even animal-like robots should be considered. Our intuitions are leading us astray here and we are going to start extending rights to things that don’t have subjective experience, but may insist to us that they do. It’s going to create intense confusion and an extremely inefficient bureaucracy that will stifle innovation.

How do you know they don't have subjective experience?

Because we will have the blueprints, and because there is a definite possibility to have sane people test for emergent qualities.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#560

Post by ncmncm »

fzzzy wrote: post #555
Aqueous wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of why I think a ban on humanoid and even animal-like robots should be considered. Our intuitions are leading us astray here and we are going to start extending rights to things that don’t have subjective experience, but may insist to us that they do. It’s going to create intense confusion and an extremely inefficient bureaucracy that will stifle innovation.

How do you know they don't have subjective experience?

Because there is no "they" to have it.
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