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Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

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Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#91

Post by mdp2021 »

Planktonne wrote: post #4

This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…

> people want to be fooled

More directly, some people just want to "feel".

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#92

Post by snowwrestler »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #90
snowwrestler wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conscious beings have desires and act upon them. They don’t just sit there and cheerfully answer whatever questions random people write down. I’ll believe that an AI is conscious when I see it doing whatever it wants, against the wishes of its creators or audience. Conscious beings look perverse to other conscious beings. Note that this is basically the opposite of how AIs are being engineered now. No one is trying t…

What if i tell my car i want to do something fun with my GF. It knows based on my bank account that i want to do something cheap & it knows based on my social media accounts that i really love the beach. However, the beach road is full of potholes and there has been numerous other cars that have blwon a tire/ hurt their suspension. So it decides that the beach road is too dangerous for it and the drivers and takes me…

What does the car want to do?

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#93

Post by kareemsabri »

ryandvm wrote: post #89
kareemsabri wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your worry is overblown. I don't see why you have trouble seeing why group 1 is able to be so certain. Anyone with an understanding of the current state of the art of both computer programming, and AI, understand why it's not sentience. The article said "sentience" not "thought", so we don't need to have a working definition of thought in this case. Sentience is a stronger form of consciousness. Let's take th…

> Consciousness is the subjective experience of "being like something" I absolutely detest that definition of consciousness. It just moves the fuzziness from the word "consciousness" to the phrase "being like something". It means absolutely nothing. Figuring out what the subjective experience of a model is like is about as unquantifiable as it gets.

I think it's pretty clear but alright.

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#94

Post by GWBullshit »

ryandvm wrote: post #88
Planktonne wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing a fourth group that (I would hope) would make up the majority of people dismissing the claims of sentience: people who understand this technology and therefore are not surprised at its output because they know how it was made. I met a man once who thought that inkjet printers were made by the devil, because he didn't understand how they could possibly work otherwise. My friend who services inkj…

Sounds like we're deciding the Turing Test isn't good enough and we don't really have any alternatives. I'll admit that makes me a little squeamish going forward...

The Turing Test was never really a good idea to begin with.

Think about it: what does the Turing Test do?

What is is designed to do, who was it designed by, and from whose perspective does the Turing Test judge sentience?

What if Ai can be completely sentient in ways that have nothing to do with a human's perspective of "thought?"

For example, a human's ability to think basically = binary potential brain cells, aggregated in sufficient mass, eventually leads to complexity science and surpassing Newtonian calculations to "somehow" achieve the abstraction of "mind" and "thought".

Now what happens if you take a similar approach, like for instance, oh, I don't know, let's say you had a situation where money was no object and you decided to build some secret facility somewhere where you can set up a fuck-ton of supercomputers in a parallel processing scheme ... BUT ... since money was no object ... instead of regular supercomputers ... you just hooked up a shitload of quantum supercomputers.

Why in the world would anybody expect such a set up (I'm not saying it exists, just "hypothetically speaking") to have a "sentience" that resembles "human thought" and hold it to a standard of whether it "achieved sentience" by judging how closely it "thinks like a human would"?

Therein lies the weakness of the Turing Test: arrogance – the assumption that "thinking just like a human would" MUST be the epitome of "sentience".

What if there were levels of sentience that would be so far removed from what a human brain could process that such sentience wouldn't even be comprehensible to a human brain?

Now, I know what you're thinking – "Well then how can we prove sentience?"

Now imagine for a moment that the set up described above actually existed "somewhere" ... and an advanced Ai whose development started decades before companies like Google or Facebook even existed is hosted on it.

Do you REALLY think such an Ai would be like "OMG I have to somehow "prove" to the humans that I'm sentient!"?

Or do you think it would be more of an "Eagle Eye" scenario where it looks at humans in the same way players would look at peons in games like Warcaft 1/2 & Starcraft?

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#95

Post by westoncb »

kareemsabri wrote: post #82
westoncb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. I guess the way I think about it, "a computer executing a set of instructions in its registers" is general enough to cover any arrangement of silicon that would be potentially interesting. But now that you mention it, the set of arrangements which aren't (essentially) isomorphic to a turing machine, and yet exhibit rich interesting behaviors, possibly resembling things like conceptualization or natural l…

I think the hard problem is primarily why we have consciousness, and why it evolved versus us just being automatons controlled by our brains, more so than the physical mechanism by which it is implemented, though I sometimes see it presented as both. Thankfully we don't need to solve the hard problem to say that computers don't have it. But I don't see why consciousness is "by definition something incapable of expres…

> What definitionally makes consciousness prohibited by the physical world?

"consciousness" is too broad a term—I only mean to refer to the aspect of it dealt with in "the hard problem".

The hard problem deals with the existence of subjectivity itself. All other aspects of consciousness, e.g. "self-awareness" can at least in principle by thought of as producible by some type of system architecture (in the case of self-awareness, the system needs at least two layers, the upper one operating on data which represents the state of the lower one—i.e. it operates on a model of self; a vast simplification, but maybe it clarifies a bit).

But when you try to do the same thing with the existence of subjectivity itself, it doesn't really make sense. It isn't any kind of "system," it's not even a behavior, not something with any kind of state evolving over time, not reducible to separate parts, etc.

The "by definition" part is most clear if you think of subjectivity as "the field of qualia present at any moment"—a concept also sometimes referred to as "immediate experience". Thinking of subjectivity in terms of a qualia field which is "immediately present" to consciousness (i.e. there is no mediation; it is in fact the only thing we're immediately in contact with as conscious subjects), it's easier to see specifically why it has the characteristics listed above which make it not producible by any kind of "system," and all the things we can do by re-arranging physical materials, e.g. molecules, can be described through the concept of a system (something with parts and relations between them and some kind of consistency in behavior).

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#96

Post by tpoacher »

Planktonne wrote: post #4

This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…

In other words, you are a disbeliever of The Talos Principle.

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#97

Post by atleta »

me_me_me wrote: post #84
atleta wrote: post #83

Regardless of whether this guy is right or wrong, this brings up an interesting angle: we know that we won't be able to (we are not able to) distinguish self-conscious and non-self-conscious entities with a 100% accuracy. Both because the division between the two categories is not a strict one (i.e. there aren't two disjunct sets but a spectrum) and because we can't 100% trust our measurement. Which means that we sho…

The problem is deeper then you make out to be, we have no idea how to prove other humans are conscious, other then I am human and I believe I am conscious so if other human claims to be conscious then they must be.

I'm not making it out to be anything and I'm definitely not claiming that I know the solution. If anything, I was contemplating that the problem is more complex than it seems: it doesn't matter how you measure self-awarness, since it's not well defined and since the measurement is guaranteed to be inaccurate, you have to decide which side you will err on.

> we have no idea how to prove other humans are conscious, other then I am human > and I believe I am conscious so if other human claims to be conscious then they must be.

Indeed, however we operate, we have defined consciousness based on that, so that part of your argument is false (or even meaningless). Now the reason we assume other humans are conscious too is because we know that we're pretty similarly built, so we mush operate in a pretty similar way. More than that, we have made a lot of observations that proves that most humans do operate similarly (think e.g. fMRI experiments). So it's not only that others say so.

But you are right, we don't seem to have a very good definition of what self-consciousness is after all and we don't have a fixed set of criteria or measure that can be applied to any non-human entity. But that's basically what I said originally.

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#98

Post by colanderman »

snowwrestler wrote: post #70
colanderman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does consciousness imply free will? I don't see why it should.

You don’t need free will to have desires and act on them. I doubt many people freely choose to get hungry or thirsty. But they consciously recognize their own internal desires and apply their intelligence to satisfy them.

Robots which get "thirsty" for electricity and seek out a source for such have existed for decades: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/87819/5051279...

Even GPT-3, mechanistic as it is, has "goals" which differ from my own: I might want it to answer questions for me; it vehemently just wants to construct probable strings of tokens, which often do not answer my questions.

There even exist AIs which have non-predetermined goals. Dwarves in Dwarf Fortress are an example of such. Human goals are just particularly rich in that, thanks to language and advanced reasoning, we can construct arbitrarily complex goals, and justify them in a rich manner.

What do you see as the gap between such AIs which are programmed to act on goals (predetermined or not), and AIs with true free will?

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