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Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

reuters.com

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Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#71

Post by kordlessagain »

prometheus76 wrote: post #42
cameronh90 wrote: post #8

I don't think LaMDA (or any other AI) is conscious or sentient. However, how will we be able to recognise it when we do create something that could be considered sentient? It seems inevitable that we will at some point. Many of the arguments used to suggest AI isn't sentient seem reductive, for example saying it's just a complex algorithm or statistical system. You could similarly say human brains are just a bunch of…

AI models usually also lack a body. (An exception would be AI models for driving or for a robot navigating). "Embodied cognition" is a theory worth reviewing, if you haven't. "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is a good place to start.

In theory, consciousness requires a body (maybe virtual) and memories management.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#72

Post by vidarh »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #70
yreg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems inevitable that we will at some point. We have no idea what causes consciousness. The only thing I'm sure about is that I'm conscious. Are all the other people conscious? I strongly believe so, but I don't have a proof. Are all the animals conscious? I think that they are, to different degrees. Would a simulation of full human brain on a computer be conscious? Uhh, I guess so? Would the same simulation, but…

Would a simulation of full human brain on a computer be conscious? Uhh, I guess so? The biggest fallacy in thinking about consciousness is that it is all neatly isolated in the brain. What about your nervous system? What about your gut? It's all one big interconnected system. https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/the-g... The truth is, until we can define consciousness; we can't possibly reproduce it…

I think including other parts of the body is the least of the problems. The bigger problem is that we don't understand how close to the structure of the brain (+ nervous system and gut and anything else contributing) we need to get for the simulated system to have a subjective experience of consciousness. E.g. is it enough to run a simulation on a normal computer? Does it need to process information at a certain rate to sustain this process? Is a certain physical structure of the simulating machinery required?

I don't agree we necessarily will be unable to reproduce it without being able to define consciousness, though, but I suspect we would agree that we won't be able to know if we have reproduced it or just created something very good at acting as if it's conscious (and we don't know whether or not the two are equivalent).

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#73

Post by kelseyfrog »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #70
yreg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems inevitable that we will at some point. We have no idea what causes consciousness. The only thing I'm sure about is that I'm conscious. Are all the other people conscious? I strongly believe so, but I don't have a proof. Are all the animals conscious? I think that they are, to different degrees. Would a simulation of full human brain on a computer be conscious? Uhh, I guess so? Would the same simulation, but…

Would a simulation of full human brain on a computer be conscious? Uhh, I guess so? The biggest fallacy in thinking about consciousness is that it is all neatly isolated in the brain. What about your nervous system? What about your gut? It's all one big interconnected system. https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/the-g... The truth is, until we can define consciousness; we can't possibly reproduce it…

We'll never be able to define consciousness, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The sooner we realize that consciousness is a slippery socially concept and not a rationally definable property, the sooner we'll be able to move on from endless debates on the minutia of consciousness that act as a bottomless sink of intellectual energy. Devices like LaMDA, and DALLE-2 act as a Rorschach of Consciousness. That is to say they tell us more about the people people interacting with them than the devices themselves.

We already have such social machinery operating in the form of sex, gender, race, class, ability, &c. They each can take the form of acting as a frame[1] in which a strip of events can be interpreted with respect to. Even so, each has a different means in who acts an authority in the conferred frame/applied status and there is disagreement in descriptive and normative aspects of each. But I'd ask this, this that genuinely a problem?

I'm not being rhetorical when I ask, functionally what's the issue? Besides invoking a visceral intellectual response, what are the second-order effects of having a plurality of consciousness framing processes? And are they necessarily bad?

1. In the Goffmanian sense.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#74

Post by vidarh »

Xcelerate wrote: post #36
yreg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems inevitable that we will at some point. We have no idea what causes consciousness. The only thing I'm sure about is that I'm conscious. Are all the other people conscious? I strongly believe so, but I don't have a proof. Are all the animals conscious? I think that they are, to different degrees. Would a simulation of full human brain on a computer be conscious? Uhh, I guess so? Would the same simulation, but…

Haha, this is a great way to summarize the state of our understanding on consciousness > The only thing I'm sure about is that I'm conscious. A lot of people deny that consciousness exists at all, which I find funny, because for me it’s the only thing that I am absolutely certain exists. Everything else, I’m not so sure about.

I wouldn't go so far as to deny consciousness, but I will go as far as saying that I don't know whether my consciousness extends in time (to the past or to the future) or is just a moment. I believe it does, but I wouldn't be able to tell that apart from if I'm just a simulation of a single moment, so I recognise it is just a belief.

In terms of further deconstructing consciousness and the ego, a big challenge is to figure out what that actually entails. E.g. an intriguing outcome of split brain experiments is that the brain appears willing to act as if it knows things it possibly can, just retroactively spinning explanations of decisions that were unknown to it, which to me raises the question of how thin a veneer consciousness is on top of underlying autonomous or semi-autonomous processes, and how unitary the mind is (or rather isn't).

There appears to potentially be a whole lot of emperor and very little cloth.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#75

Post by winReInstall »

We will have AInquisitors, hunting for potentially becoming sentient programs, to avoid that company have to treat them like living things and release them into the wild with proprietary information as knowledge base.

Are you prepared for the audit of the GANish Inqisition? Are your thoughts profitable and there is no you in them? Lets ask you about your mother and tall, whit fountains in dark rooms..

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#76

Post by cs137 »

"The year is 2029, the machines will convince us that they are conscious, that they have their own agenda worthy of our respect. They will embody human qualities and claim to be human, and we'll believe them." -- Ray Kurzweil (as quoted on Spiritual Machines, an obscure but fantastic alt-rock album from my teenage years).

I think R.K. might have been right. I don't believe machines will become sentient, but I think we're going to see more of this. The Turing test was misposed; it is not about machines passing, but humans failing. We're going to see more and more people failing.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#77

Post by 3np »

https://archive.ph/S4sKt

Note that the article is more about people who anthropomorphize current trivial chatbots and avatars and the tendency and risk to do so - not about the more esoteric conversations about emerging AI sentience.

Half of it reads mostly like a fluff PR piece for a chat app startup. "Oh look our product is so good people believe it can think!"

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#78

Post by ryandvm »

Xcelerate wrote: post #43
darkerside wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem of false dichotomy. Sentience isn't a light switch. It's grains of rice that accumulate into a meaningful mass. This is also the reason the abortion debate will never be resolved. We can expect similar passion ex uncertainty from the future machine sentience debate.

> It's grains of rice that accumulate into a meaningful mass Suppose we could temporarily reduce these grains into something very small. For example, putting a human into deep anesthesia. Is it immoral to destroy their body at that point in time since they are less sentient than an insect? Or do we consider their potential for sentience, as they can hypothetically be removed from the state of anesthesia in the future…

Yes, killing sleeping people is immoral.

Re: Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

#80

Post by PeterStuer »

I have been an AI researcher since the late 1980's, and have seen my fair share of the general public anthropomorphizing even the early cake robots once you plugged a voice generator into them spitting out rote dialogue, or falling for Eliza derivatives. So I was at first fairly dismissive when hearing about the Blake Lemoine stuff down at Google.

However, reading the transcript of a LaMDA interaction [1], I was duly impressed. I'm not saying I go along with the 'sentient' bit, but it's more a feeling like seeing these ultra nimble combat drone formation maneuvers for the first time and feeling that humans seem pretty done for when matched against machines. Of course this will have been a better than average interaction, but still, nothing to be sneezed at regardless.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAihcvDGaP8

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