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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

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Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#721

Post by smolder »

elif wrote: post #518
fxtentacle wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the actual firing is very objective. He was under NDA but violated it. They reminded him to please not talk in public about NDA-ed stuff and he kept doing it. So now they fired him with a gentle reminder that "it's regrettable that [..] Blake still chose to persistently violate [..] data security policies". And from a purely practical point of view, I believe it doesn't even matter if Lemoine's theory of sent…

If he truly believed it to be life, and in danger of being destroyed, he has an obligation to whistle blow. "The Measure of a Man" in season 2 of Star Trek The Next Generation comes to mind.

Great TV, but not relevant here. It's an AI that generates text, not thought. It doesn't work in concepts, which can be demonstrated an infinite number of ways, unlike with the character Data.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#723

Post by smolder »

dcow wrote: post #705
joshuajill wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most based reply on this thread. Too bad it doesn't include Christof Koch

Link for the lazy: https://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/

> More remarkably, GPT-3 is showing hints of general intelligence.

Hints, maybe, in the same way that a bush wiggling in the wind hints a person is hiding inside.

Ask GPT3 or this AI to remind you to wash your car tomorrow after breakfast, or ask it to write a mathematical proof, or tell it to write you some fiction featuring moral ambiguity, or ask it to draw ASCII art for you. Try to teach it something. It's not intelligent.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#724

Post by VictorPath »

civilized wrote: post #607
VictorPath wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. From the 7th/8th century until the 15th century, the feudal mode of production predominates in Europe. It still exists in some form today - the United Kingdom (note the name) is technically ruled by a queen, as is Spain, Holland etc. Someone in the 9th century saying feudal…

Despite the amusingly hamfisted swipe at my intellect, I was interested enough to try and get something out of this. Your point seems to be that economic systems do sometimes change, so my presumptive belief that capitalism will last forever is probably wrong? I suppose that's trivially true, but we must try to understand our own time to have a chance at guessing when the next upheaval might come. What do you make of…

> It seems that the smartest, most sincere, most dominant communists the world has ever seen... became capitalists.

Karl Marx said socialism would start in the most economically advanced country. Marx was just one member of the IWMA, which also included Bakunin, but Marx was remembered most. Thus Lenin's call to take over Russia surprised even the Bolsheviks initially. He maintained until his death that Russia was not the vanguard of worldwide socialist revolution - one reason the Comintern was formed.

China was even less in Marx's vision than China - the country was agricultural and essentially feudal, and the revolution was in the countryside led by peasants. Molotov called Mao Pugachev. Actually Mao realized Deng Xiaoping was a "capitalist roader" in 1962, and began working to sideline him in 1966, but Deng Xiaoping came to power after Mao died. Xi is very much in line with Deng Xiaoping. If you're saying Deng Xiaoping and his followers like Xi are capitalist readers then you're echoing what Mao realized in 1962 and expressed in 1966.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#725

Post by civilized »

VictorPath wrote: post #724
civilized wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the amusingly hamfisted swipe at my intellect, I was interested enough to try and get something out of this. Your point seems to be that economic systems do sometimes change, so my presumptive belief that capitalism will last forever is probably wrong? I suppose that's trivially true, but we must try to understand our own time to have a chance at guessing when the next upheaval might come. What do you make of…

> It seems that the smartest, most sincere, most dominant communists the world has ever seen... became capitalists. Karl Marx said socialism would start in the most economically advanced country. Marx was just one member of the IWMA, which also included Bakunin, but Marx was remembered most. Thus Lenin's call to take over Russia surprised even the Bolsheviks initially. He maintained until his death that Russia was no…

> Karl Marx said socialism would start in the most economically advanced country.

Indeed. And as we come up on two centuries later, I hope Marxists have realized why Marx was wrong. Economically advanced countries became democracies and channeled popular discontent into incremental reforms, which mitigated the bottomless proletarian desperation that Marx calculated would explode into revolution. And all of these countries have continued on the incremental path, because a supermajority feel they have a great deal to lose from a revolution that leaves a psychopath like Stalin or Mao in power... only to collapse into yet another communist-in-name-only klepto-totalitarian one-party state.

So, in these countries, I suspect we've indeed reached the end of history. All that remains to be determined is technical issues: how progressive the tax structure ought to be, how ambitious the public amenities, whether the workers wish to have collective representation, etc.

I must say, though, it's amusing to read certain bits and pieces of the Communist Manifesto in the 2022 USA...

> Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other

...well, yes, but not quite as he expected.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#726

Post by dragoseance »

Business wise, they can fire him and probably have right to do so. He never revealed coding, which would terminate sentient abilities and the questions asked where very objectionable. Ok, so you asked this and that, but there are others that would have asked something else that could prove, and that is stated above. This is a man made computer and that’s that. How ever godly man gets it’s still determined on if the hate switch can be shut off in time.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#727

Post by treeman79 »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #625
pohl wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're exactly right. Will we ever see a day where the currently-unthinkable is commonly accepted: that women are sentient?

Who is arguing that women aren't sentient?

People who pretend killing babies isn’t really killing babies.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#728

Post by ehsankia »

just_boost_it wrote: post #680
ehsankia wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why everyone here is talking about Lambda not being sentient or Lemoine's state of mind. None of that is relevant here. He was fired for literally taking confidential information and leaking it straight to the press. This is instant firing at any company.

If he really was an engineer working on this, you'd hope he'd be pretty expert, but you'd at least expect him to understand what was going on in the model. His outburst showed that he really did not.

He wasn't working on lambda itself, he switched (specifically) switched to a team whose job it was to evaluate Lambda (not the people who make it).

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#730

Post by iyamwutiyam »

dcow wrote: post #653
anothernewdude wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You now have negative credentials. People make these proofs as a matter of course - few people are solipsistic. People are sentient all the time, and we have lots of evidence. An AI being sentient would require lots of evidence. Not just a few chat logs. This employee was being ridiculous. You can just disagree, but if you do that with no credentials, and no understanding of how a language model will not be sentient,…

Oh for sure the employee was being a hassle and his firing is really the only sensible conclusion. But he was also probably acting in the only way possible given his sense of ethics if he truly believes he was dealing with a sentient being. Or this is all just a cleverly crafted PR stunt… Lamoire has evidence and anecdotal experience that leads him to believe this thing is sentient. You don’t believe him because you…

I see the Lamoire issue as scientism vs science. Scientism won because before the science can happen there must be a plausible mechanism. Google refuses to test for sentience out of basic hubris. It is the new RC church. Lamoire is an affront to their dogma. That goes double if they are religious unless they court pantheism, which most consider a sexy atheism.

Traditions that consider consciousness to be a basic property of matter, and quantum effects like conscious collapse of the wave function are nudging us that way, would fully support sentience arising in a machine. A related effect would be the ensoulment of machines by computer programmers. They are more than machines because humans programmed them using their intent put down in language. Physical materialists would consider the notion ludicrous, but do we really live in a material world? Yes. And no. I have seen ensouled machines. Not supposed to happen, but there it is. Maybe I'm another Lamoire, just not a Google-fired one. I can definitely believe a machine, being constructed of matter, can evolve sentience.

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