LaMDA is not sentient • Hacker News Board

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#601

Post by skjoldr » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 9:30 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #558

skjoldr wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Setting up the goal structure for an AI is a very difficult topic indeed, from the safety standpoint.

We already fight against ourselves. This is why psychotherapy exists, to help us resolve internal conflicts and set our own goals. Often these conflicts arise because we adopt the viewpoints of our parents or other authority figures and can't let go of them later in life. A neurotic AI is certainly an amusing possibility.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#602

Post by tsimionescu » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 9:30 PM UTC

chromaton wrote: post #345

tsimionescu wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you in your question give it all the information that is relevant (interspersed with irrelevant information if you want) then it will respond with its best interpretation of the information it is given, just like a human would. I don't think that's actually true, as GPT-3 will tend to ignore any facts about the world that were part of its corpus just to fit a question better. For example, if you prompt it wit…

Google gives a reasonable answer to that question.

Yes, but Google (search) is not LaMDA, and it is built with many hand-programmed heuristics.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#603

Post by thfuran » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

candlemas wrote: post #516

thfuran wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a human brain is just changing physical and quantum states of the underlying material and isn't doing anything different at that level than any other pile of meat.

I think a human brain is quite a bit different from any other pile of meat. But a computer running an AI versus the computer running TurboTax is the same thing. They're running through the same set of instructions, swapping the same bits of data in and out of memory.

Why is another piece of meat different? It's just the same quarks.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#604

Post by tsimionescu » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

busyboy wrote: post #597

rendall wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Descartes helped us to understand our own sentience. I can accept the proposition that because I think, I am.

Thoughts are not necessary for existence.

"Because I think, I am" implies more that existence is necessary for thoughts, which is true. If you didn't exist, you couldn't think.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#605

Post by majkinetor » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #594

majkinetor wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How you do know you are not even more glorified key-value store? Afterall, you also went to training (called school) and respond with sentences that are expected by others almost all of the time. Even this response of yours is heard by hundreeds of thousands of other people before you said it here, why do you claim its your thought and not just a lookup ?

because you can shove me in an MRI and see that my brain does stuff even when I'm not answering API requests. People need to stop confusing machines doing useful work with consciousness. You're conscious not because you answer questions or because of the content or origin of your answer, you are conscious because there is an 'I', a self, that experiences that process. Lambda literally is a web server that fetches dat…

I can shove Lambda server in an "MRI" and see that it does stuff evern when it is not answering your questions.

> People need to stop confusing machines doing useful work with consciousness.

We can't confuse anything with cosciousness since we don't know what it is. I am not claiming lamda is consc. but that your arguments are invalid.

> You are conscious because there is an 'I', a self, that experiences that process.

I maybe can tell about my I, but not about yours, there is a whole philosphy movement behind it.

> It has as much neurological activity as a rock

Slime mold doesn't have neurological activity. Is it sentient? It sure knows how to find food and solve problems that are considered very hard for humans.

> when it isn't doing that, it's not doing anything

You also go to sleep every day...

No matter what I believe any kind of argument I heard so far is just wishfull thinking.

We simply don't know if anything is sentient or what does it even mean to be sentient.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#606

Post by jonathankoren » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

klabb3 wrote: post #391

jonathankoren wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you say this. Whenever someone would bring a Magic 8 Ball to school, the Pentecostal kids would inevitably show up to yell at us for “summoning demons” and “disobeying Jesus” because we were “fortune telling”. Of course this was the same school district that had to give out permission slips whenever we talked about probability because it would involve flipping coins, and rolling dice.

This is actually hilarious.

I'm pretty sure experiences like this, reading about Greek mythology, and paranormal fraudsters as a kid inoculated me to religion.

I will never understand how a grown ass adult can take the supernatural seriously.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#607

Post by mickotron » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #478

hemloc_io wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a portion of the population zealously believes that AIs are sentient we could see the same treatment of AI researchers or even software engineers as we've seen in other scientific pursuits by the religious. That's quite scary to me personally.

Chatbots could deliver the personal connection to a messiah figure so many modern religious movements emphasize. I would be surprised if we don't see a church founded around the ramblings of a discarded bot in our lifetimes.

Well we already have QANon, so I guess your idea isn’t so far fetched after all.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#608

Post by teawrecks » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

animal_spirits wrote: post #387

jfoster wrote: post #358

The Turing test is imperfect & LaMDA is probably not sentient, sure, but what's a better test?

I don't think there can ever be a test to prove something is sentient.

Just like there can never be a test to prove I don't live in a simulation.

The only proof I have that I exist is: I think, therefore I am.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#609

Post by majkinetor » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

mdp2021 wrote: post #580

majkinetor wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How you do know you are not even more glorified key-value store? Afterall, you also went to training (called school) and respond with sentences that are expected by others almost all of the time. Even this response of yours is heard by hundreeds of thousands of other people before you said it here, why do you claim its your thought and not just a lookup ?

Because reflection, vetting and processing of ideas are conscious: you witness them - one can tell when it is a lookup vs "having really thought about it".

Some obviously can't tell or we wouldn't have this discussion ...

Reflection, vetting and processing can all be programmed. Humans are programmed from the birth.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#610

Post by stavros » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #585

stavros wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably LaMDA already learns from its input/knows what it's already talked about, and to satisfy #1 you could trivially just run it on some sort of null input. #1 doesn't really make much sense, it already is constantly "on", it just doesn't do anything while there's no input for it to receive.

You appear to have only read up to the first comma of #1. I very explicitly said that it needed to be constantly receiving input . The kind of discrete input we give it now is qualitatively different, even if it's "on" in the same sense that an Apache server is always "on", waiting for requests.

What does "constantly receiving input" mean? How would a program whose input is text be constantly receiving input? What would you expect it to receive?