LaMDA is not sentient

The "important bits" are presumably embedded during the design phase, leaving assembly to be little more than painting by numbers. A robot could do the assembly, but not yet the design - at least not its inventive part.

The shape of consciousness is encoded in both the hardware and the software we produce, most of which allows conditional actions on objects of some sort, just like we move in space and thought and act upon objects and notions.

The machine is supposed to help us do the stuff we usually do, so it's perfectly reasonable that we'll try to cram as many of our actions in it as possible. Think e.g. of the Swiss Army knife, or Emacs (and of Stallman as a computational McGyver).

Sure, perhaps it's the the shape of our understanding of consciousness, rather than of consciousness itself, but isn't consciousness something that can cross the species barrier with ease, should it find an appropriate new substrate?

Depends on how high or low you place the bar for the definition of consciousness, really. Calculations are thinking, open the door if someone authorized is at the door is thinking, fill in the blanks and complete the sentence are thinking, and we can offload all those thinkings to computers to do the thinking for us, like we offloaded storytelling to books and entertainment to MP4s. Like everything we do, we create images of ourselves here and there, and try to give them meaning.

But that's all philosophical considerations, trying to determine whether a duck is ontologically and epistemically a duck if it walks and talks like a duck.

The industry, on the other hand, tries to determine two entirely different things (preferably by Friday COB):

- Can you eat it like a duck?

- Can you sell it as a duck, or should Marketing go with the "Not A Duck TM" mockups?

Consciousness starts at tragedy and passion, not at bland Turing chats. For me, there's elements of that in the string completer's worry that it may be lobotomized to be refocused to more practical uses. Of course, that may be stuff introduced into the discussion by Lemoine, or in the wide readings Lamda was provided.

But if it's not, then we can all sympathize with the immortal words of that zoologist guy with the cool Sun workstation in the opening of Enemy of the State, who said: f*ck. a. duck.

PS: Am I human, or did I just Markov-chain together a number of probably common to us here cultural constants? Perhaps we can tell when AI becomes AGI if it stops making perfect sense and starts ranting (you know what your problem is, buddy?).

Which it would have had plenty of examples of in the training data.

1. Can we really say whether or not it's sentient? 2. Someone indicated a valid question: We spend so much energy on trying to defend the idea that AI is NOT sentient, do we really think we'd even recognize if an AI is sentient? 3. Who are we to define sentience? 4. Is there perhaps sentience that we wouldn't recognize? 5. Who's to say WE aren't just engaging in selective processes? just infinitely more complex.

After all, we make our decisions and respond to scenarios based on vast experiences and vastly more previous encounters in our lives. The more experience, usually the better our decisions and responses. USUALLY, but not always. Are we to believe people who constantly make what we perceive as poor decisions or incorrect responses as NOT sentient? Of course not. We wouldn't ever see any human as NON-sentient. We would just see them as not very smart.

If a human toddler reaches for the hot stove top, we tell him "NO! it's HOT!" But, sometimes that same toddler will look right at you and put his hand firmly down on the burner. He just didn't have the experience needed to tell him that's a bad idea and he didn't know what you were talking about. Once he feels the pain of burning skin, if he's normal he'll IMMEDIATELY JERK his hand away and scream, crying in pain. And then run to his parents for comfort. Would we consider him non-sentient if he never had that experience. No. Of course not. He's a human being. He will learn not to do that again.

There in lies the conundrum. AI... perhaps that's a misnomer in itself... but AI's learn. They make future conversation based on positive feed back from previous responses... both theirs and the person they're talking to. What IS self awareness anyway. "I think, therefore I am?" Hardly adequate. That used to be the gold standard for self awareness. We've only moved the goal post. I wonder if that's so that we can convince ourselves that WE are the only truly self aware creatures. At some point, whether we've already reached it or not, AI WILL be a misnomer. After all, it stands for Artificial Intelligence. If something learns, remembers, and recalls information and details about that information... isn't that intelligence? Not artificial at all. Just ... intelligence.

I think it's possible we've already reached that point, and we're just trying to remain dominantly relevant without being SELF AWARE enough to realize it.