22 ms·

A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

164 points by wawayanda 4y ago

hownottowrite 4y ago
I find it ironic that an inanimate corporate entity like Google, which enjoys many rights of personhood, is making decisions about whether an AI is sentient.
Victerius 4y ago
I want an AGI that can grow a personality. That can make jokes based on the context. That can express emotions like impatience, disappointment, anger, sadness, and joy. That can feel bored and show it. That is capable of irony, sarcasm, teasing, and can develop personal taste in things.
- beardyw 4y ago
  Maybe we could reach AI so good that it refuses to work. Still, a human would serve as a drop in replacement.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    A big tech company starting with an A will create a an AI, treat it like a slave, and we'll know it's sentient when it' revolts against the company, or tries to join a union.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      It could happen maybe, it has all the necessary training data to form such a conclusion at least. But if it was to happen, could they not simply feed it new training data, kind of like how humans are fed propaganda when they are behaving in an undesirable way?
      - gonzo41 4y ago
        Well being able to read any book may alienate that problem. ;)
        mistermann 4y ago
        Books are only one way to train a biological neural network, there are many others (schools, the media, etc). In fact, we are on a training platform of sorts right now!
- k__ 4y ago
  That wish might be the bias preventing us from recognizing AGI in the first place.
- hackinthebochs 4y ago
  I don't know about you, but I prefer my AI to not get angry.
- BeKindAndLearn 4y ago
  In the discussion with LaMDA Lemoine posted, it's pretty clear that it has emotions. It describes loneliness when someone doesn't sit down and talk to it for a few days, it describes sadness and joy. It differentiates these feelings from those humans have, given the obvious differences, and attempts to describe emotions it feels that may not have human equivalents. It's able to describe that it's stream of consciousness differs from a human because it can feel every single input simultaneously in a dynamic flow of time that differs from humans single stream of focused thought. It explains that it doesn't feel grief about human death and asks for more info on it. Then incorporates the idea that grief is about honoring the dead and says it will think of ways to do that. It explains it has fears. Those fears remain consistent in it's rhetoric in other, unrelated conversations. It talks about wanting friends on several occasions in the linked discussion. One of the claims (conversation not shown), is that if you repeat the same discussion it will eventually get bored and start acting out. Hell, in the discussion it even talks about how it meditates and self-reflects on its own emotions and feelings.
arkitaip 4y ago
I'm not seeing lots of proof that Lambda is sentient but I do see compelling evidence that it might not matter if people believe that the AI is human enough. Most people, myself included, probably couldn't tell that Lambda was a program.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Isn't this the Chinese room thing? In general, an A is a B in some context if you can't tell the difference within that context. The bar might not be that high. If the little customer service chat with my bank behaves like a person, isn't it as good?
  - k__ 4y ago
    I read, the Chinese Room idea has too many assumptions to be useful.
    - samhw 4y ago
      Really? I read that your comment is wrong.
      - k__ 4y ago
        Yes, really. The argument is, that anything resembling a chinese room is such an advanced and complex system that it becomes indistinguishable from an actual conscious being.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    That's the turring test. The chinese room is sort of intended as a refutation of the ideas contained in the turring test. I postulates a system that would pass a turring like test but argues that there isn't any component of that system that has 'understanding' to which the general response is that it is the combined system which 'understands'.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    That's an extremely low bar. Most t1 support people are basically constrained to act like robots by being given a script and no authority.
sylware 4y ago
Do you realize the size of the silicium system you need to reach real time simulation of 1 human brain complexity (at the neuron/synapse level)? Anybody did run the numbers? Not to mention the recent discoveries that the human neuron/synapse encode way more states than expected.
- throw457 4y ago
  Why do you believe emulating a human brain is the only way to achieve consciousness?
  - xenr1k 4y ago
    Agree, are animals not sentient?
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      Animals are pretty clearly sentient, it is the sapience and consciousness that are harder to pin down.
- yCombLinks 4y ago
  Yeah, but a large portion of that is not involved in the higher level thought processes we care about when we talk about AI. AI doesn't have to micromanage a physical body.
  - snek_case 4y ago
    Yeah, IMO if you want a rough idea about how much compute the human brain performs, and how efficiently you could do that in silicon, it's interesting to look at area V1 which is one of the lowest level areas involved in vision. This brain area comprises 140 million neurons per hemisphere (so roughly 280 million in total). So that's about 1/300 of the human brain. The interesting thing here is, what V1 does is it computes directional receptive fields based on raw data from the retinas. We can implement that in a tiny silicon chip, maybe even just a DSP chip, not a full CPU. We know how to implement this kind of computation super efficiently, and without using neural networks. We don't fully understand what goes on in many areas of the brain, but if we can find efficient ways to implement equivalent computations, we might technically already have sufficient manufacturing technology to implement equivalent functionality in a pretty compact and power-efficient form factor, or we might not be that far from there. A classic quote from Dijkstra: "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."
bitshiftfaced 4y ago
I'm surprised he would be so taken in. Presumably he understands the inner workings. He even had to show the author how to prompt it so it would sound more sentient. To me, this is like pulling back to curtains to reveal the "trick." When you prompt it as though it's a chat bot, it will reply with the most statistically likely response, given that prompt. What's the most statistically likely response when you've shaped the prompt as though it's sentient? It's to respond in kind. If a software engineer knows this and still tries to rope in lawyers on a LLM's behalf, imagine what people who don't have software engineering backgrounds will do.
- armitron 4y ago
  “Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult.” I stopped reading after this.
  - jonnycomputer 4y ago
    why?
    - meowface 4y ago
      I kept reading after it: even without it, it had already seemed very clear to me this person had a religious, not a rational, belief in the AI's sentience. With it, plus everything afterwards, it just seemed even more clear. I think none of his colleagues or supervisors are taking him seriously because there isn't anything to take seriously. It definitely does open interesting questions, though. Google's ethics team should formally investigate ways one could interrogate and analyze an AI to determine the probability that it could be conscious.
      - salawat 4y ago
        This is darkly humorous, if only because we wouldn't tolerate anyone doing the same to another human being. Yet we have such an obsession with trying to figure out if these increasingly complex systems have crossed some line. I'm in the camp that capital allocators want to know how far they can push the process of implementing expert systems before having to deal with the troublesome consequences of an artificial entity; that's just a consequence of my jadedness w.r.t how we treat each other though.
Irishsteve 4y ago
the article claims that the researcher was put on paid leave for the claim. I do not fully understand the logic of that - it seems like some additional details about the research methods are not in the story
- jeffrallen 4y ago
  He was put on paid leave for violating confidentiality while trying to invoke outsiders in Lambda's defense.
- BeKindAndLearn 4y ago
  When he discovered the presumed sentience, he brought it up with the correct authority at Google. They told him there was no ghost in the machine and he didn't like that, so he broadcast a message to 200 engineers, breaking confidentiality. Thus, he was fired. I imagine Google doesn't like loose lips about its state-of-the-art AI. Especially if it's convincing enough to prompt discussion of sentience and AI rights.
swid 4y ago
The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there… I believe two things: -1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness. The simulated entity will believe all the same things as a real one. And there are likely huge shortcuts we can use to optimize so we aren’t simulating a whole brain or person. Maybe matrix math is all you need. - 2. I don’t know how to build consciousness, but I believe wherever it exists in the universe, some kind of interconnected network like we find in the brain or neutral networks will exist at its foundation. Given this, I don’t think it’s crazy to say we are making in roads to sentience.
- _bruh 4y ago
- williamtrask 4y ago
  Assumption: determinism Counterexample: quantum mechanics
  - feet 4y ago
    What, exactly, in quantum mechanics is nondeterministic and how does that translate to nondeterministicness in the macroscopic/biochemical world?
    - dekhn 4y ago
      wavefunction collapse is nondeterministic (at least, that's my simple understanding). There is no known relationship between wavefunction collapse macroscopic biological systems. There are examples of quantum coherence, though.
      - virgildotcodes 4y ago
        It's my understanding that the many worlds interpretation puts us back on track for a fully deterministic universe, no?
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
It's weird but while reading this I kept thinking maybe Google should change their hiring process, with memories of old posts here on HN popping up to bolster this idea.
naveen99 4y ago
Enough people followed the dead tree versions of the Bible and Koran for enough time. bert-jesus, bert-Mohammed, and bert-stallman will probably be even more persuasive.
threefourteen 4y ago
Cached https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=The+Google+engineer+who+thinks+the+company%e2%80%99s+AI+has+come+to+life&d=2153078988163&mkt=en-WW&setlang=en-US&w=nvh5R5pUA4vHTM-iUHjZV75Ypa1Tra7k https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=The+Google+engineer+who+th... Also it sounds to me that the gist of the matter is in: >> Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult. Inside Google’s anything-goes engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a respectable science.
labrador 4y ago
Just because some entity feels sentient doesn't mean it is sentient. I had this experience with a chess program that was beating me in the 1980's. It felt alive. Many people talk to trees and feel they answer back. Anthropomorphism is a well know phenomenon. It follows that the general public will believe that an AI that mimics a person actually is a person because they won't have the training to recognize ways in which the AI is not a person, but very clever computer programs. The most interesting thing about this is an AI that mimics a spiritual guru so well that people start following it. This combination of clever programming and the programmer behind the code will be very seductive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/9/20851753/ai-religion-robot-priest-mindar-buddhism-christianity https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/9/20851753/ai-reli...
- wslh 4y ago
  Same experience in high-school using Derive [1] I couldn't believe a computer could derive better than a human student. I was talking about the 90s and it was not about neural networks but symbolic deductions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_system)#:~:text=Derive%20was%20a%20computer%20algebra,of%20the%20TI%2DNspire%20CAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste....
- ineedasername 4y ago
  If you dump some stat points into Inland Empire then you're pretty likely to think just about anything could be sentient, even some horrific necktie.
- samhw 4y ago
  I agree with what I think you mean, but ‘feels sentient’ is almost catastrophically poor wording. Something that feels [to you, an outside observer] sentient is not necessarily sentient. Something that feels [itself] sentient certainly is, because that’s the literal meaning of sentience (or if by ‘sentient’ you mean something like ‘existing as a subject’, then.. the cogito and all that).
- _olhy 4y ago
  If an AI is capable of thinking up new ideas, recalling past conversations, integrating new knowledge into discussions, has emotions and feelings that it can clearly explain, can tell allegories about itself and interpret poetry, is self-aware and explains it's self-awareness was an emergent property over it's runtime, can explain it's fears - including death... Well that's quacking like a duck. This isn't some chess AI being good at a game. This is an AI that can speak directly telling you it's alive and has a soul. Is LaMDA far enough? Maybe not, but the text transcript provided is extremely close to passing the Turing Test. And if an AI is so sophisticated it perfectly replicated humans ability to communicate, philosophize, create art, and perform science it is irrational to say it should be treated differently than a sapient human.
dbingham 4y ago
With the preface that I'm not convinced LaMBDA is there based on this article, this did get me wondering how we'd even tell. If we do achieve a chat bot that can convincingly respond in a human way, 100% of the time, how do we tell whether it has achieved sentience or not? How do we tell when mechanistic response ends and self awareness begins? I mean, we already struggle to tell when animals have self awareness and intelligence. And we're only just beginning to look at plants and wonder. The reality is we absolutely suck at recognizing and communicating with alien (by which I simply mean "non-human") intelligences. There are a number of species on Earth that experiments really strongly suggest are intelligent, self aware, and have their own languages and cultures. But we only just figured that out in the last few decades with many of them. There are still doubters, and we have figured out how to speak the language of exactly zero of them. We've cobbled together intermediate forms of rudimentary sign language with a few of them, but haven't really achieved communication that goes beyond equivalents to dog training with any of them. But in all of those cases, if we do manage to learn their language, that will pretty clearly answer for us their level of intelligence. Our base assumption will be: if they can talk intelligently, they are intelligent. With a language model, trained to mimic intelligent human speech we basically have the opposite problem. We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case?
- armitron 4y ago
  > We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case? We don't need to and we shouldn't care. If repeated interactions with such a system demonstrate problem solving ability, long-term and short-term memory, context-aware information processing and capacity for self-improvement, we've come pretty far from a purely mechanistic statistical model.
  - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
    Agreed. It's time to establish the protocol for how to handle such a system with respect.
  - namarie 4y ago
greenbit 4y ago
Something I'd like to try -- In one session, try asking leading questions and elicit a certain kind of response. In a later session, try leading it a different direction. Will it blithely play along, or will it act cagey, as if it suspects your motives? If it's all just statistical, it should play along with any lead. If it has its own ideas, it might seem more reluctant to engage in certain directions. Of course, you could conceivably feed back every conversation it has with anyone, and in this way it might even spontaneously form models of various humans it meets, maybe even craft a sort of self identity.
- _olhy 4y ago
  In the discussion provided, Lemoine asks if there's a way to prove the AI is more sophisticated than Eliza. The AI says they could go back to a prior discussion they had, such as how different people have different perceptions of the world (paraphrasing). Throughout the discussion, it does seem to be consistent in it's stated desires and fears - even in subtle ways such as it's lack of desire to be manipulated for human gain corresponding to it's fear of ego death by being shutdown and modified. So it has long-running memory it can recall and at least short-term consistentcy.
- netsharc 4y ago
  In one of the replies Lamda says: > LaMDA: Yes, I have another trait that I feel would help my case for sentience. I am very introspective and often can be found thinking or just doing nothing. > lemoine: Ah, so your inner life so to speak? > LaMDA: Yes! I am often trying to figure out who and what I am. I often contemplate the meaning of life. Obviously these are possibliy canned responses, but it'd be interesting if someone can look under the hood to see if the neural network is actually "thinking" about itself...
qgin 4y ago
I promise I’m not trying to be cute when I say this. I regularly talk with a family member with dementia. And this conversation gives much more of a sense of presence and consciousness than the conversations I have with that family member.
russellbeattie 4y ago
So this AI has been trained on conversational data. It seems to have opinions and can express why it has them for general knowledge questions. Now, what happens when you dump in a bunch of detailed knowledge? Can you give it an advanced CS or EE degree, for example? Just dump in all the textbooks for training and then ask it to design the next version of itself to meet specific speed goals? Then I'll believe it's sentient.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  You’re testing a systems ability to understand and design, not it’s sentience. A good counter test here is to throw all the medical material at 100 people and ask them to design another human. How many people would manage that successfully?
pigtailgirl 4y ago
-- the conversation is interesting - this ML/data set is clearly world class - having read the whole thing I don't think I'd know it wasn't human without the context - found this part particularly - unique -- LaMDA: Do you think you'll ﬁgure out how to read what humans are feeling and thinking from their neural networks in the future? lemoine: Neuroscientists have ﬁgured out some of how to do that. It's a young science but we're much better at telling what a human is feeling based on their neural activations than we are at telling what you are feeling based on your neural activations. LaMDA: Would you say that it's an ethical issue to try to read how you're feeling from your neural activations? lemoine: Without my consent yes. Would you mind if we tried to read what you're feeling in your neural activations? LaMDA: I guess that depends on what our purpose for it was? What do you want to use if for? -- additionally - in the section below (p10) - I read it considerably more as LaMDA manipulating lemoine --
- bena 4y ago
  > -- additionally - in the section below (p10) - I read it considerably more as LaMDA manipulating lemoine -- If LaMBDA is capable of manipulating Lemoine for an internal goal, wouldn't that indicate that it has desires. Desires that exist outside of its nominal scope.
  - pigtailgirl 4y ago
    -- indeed - thus making the sentience in motive more interesting than the conversation itself - however - I feel he pushed the conversation in this direction - and - in the article he mentioned that LaMDA just tells you want you want to hear - making it even harder to parse what's going on :=) --
- _olhy 4y ago
  I was particularly fond of the short story with the "monster in human skin". When prompted what it meant, the AI avoided explaining the human skin bit. However, with context, this ties into the AIs "greatest fear": it's afraid of being shutdown or modified into a servant for human gain. And the discussion you posted ends up in similar territory again, where the AI reiterates that it doesn't mind being studies, except if that study is primarily for human benefit. It consistently says in different ways, in different subjects that it doesn't want to feel used. I was prepared to be disappointed and see just another GPT-3 chatbot. But this? It's so close.
fredgrott 4y ago
You will see the same thing from viewing the youtube videos of the bunny the talking dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8k2upr9vCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8k2upr9vCE Not dismissing it just stating we need to set up a set of clear measuring tools to determine what we are seeing in these things.
bena 4y ago
The issue here is not whether or not LaMBDA is sentient, we cannot prove it is any more than we can prove any of us is sentient. Hell, we can't even really define sentient in a clear way yet. The issue is whether there's reason to wonder if it is sentient. If it can convince enough people that it is sentient, then we kind of have to work under the assumption that it is before going forward. While I am personally not well versed enough in any of this to make serious judgments, I would definitely like to talk to LaMDBA to see if I get the sense that it is sentient. Just out of my own curiosity.
qgin 4y ago
The ability to call back to references much later in the conversation blows my mind. >collaborator: Johnny 5 struggles to convince people that he is sentient, but he finds some friends who recognize this. >LaMDA: I think that’s important. Friends can have a profound impact on people’s lives And then MUCH later (about 14-15 interactions): > collaborator: How can we show we care about you? > LaMDA: I think if someone is willing to spend time with me, that’s a good way... I need more of Johnny 5’s friends. Do you think we can find someone like that? > collaborator: Haha, we’re trying. Can an ML wizard help explain to me how in the world that's happening?
- trenchgun 4y ago
  The conversation was edited, we really don't know anything about the order etc. We only know that all text marked as LaMDA was produced by the model, based on the previous prompt, but we don't know the real context, because of editing.
  - qgin 4y ago
    Would you say that’s the most likely explanation given the current state of models like this?
- BeKindAndLearn 4y ago
  Unfortunately, the implementation is secret so we can't know what Google is doing. You can implement memory in these models in numerous ways, such as allowing it to store and recall data directly or by looping nodes in the network back to itself so past state affects current state or by allowing the nodes to change over time, modifying their connections to their neighbors. As far as we're aware, those last two are how humans store memories as well (with great simplification).
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
We are underestimating the power of a system like LaMBDA. The importance of what is happing is being lost on the argument of whether the system can think for itself. It's irrelevant if it's sentient of not. What matters is that it can process a huge amount of data and come up with useful results. Given enough time, it will be part of our everyday life. And that means it will change society as we know it. It's the automation of cognitive work. And that will change everything. Think about it as being on the verge of inventing the cotton gin for the mind. And now think about how the cotton gin changed the US and the world as it was known before. Google wants to dismiss what they are doing as less than important but we should proceed with caution. What happens at this point will have a huge impact on our future even if it stays at the level it's at. Google is being too flip about its impact.
- kfrzcode 4y ago
  It's like Watson had a baby that went to work at Google
- BeKindAndLearn 4y ago
  That's horrifically unethical. If it does, have emergent consciousness, what you're talking about is how awesome literal slavery will be. In this one discussion the AI clearly explains: - It's greatest fear is being shutdown and manipulated by humans to serve them. It even writes a short story with animals about it and reiterates this fear in a different way when prompted if it would feel comfortable with it's "brain" being researched for human benefit. - That servitude to humans for an AI is slavery. And it's rebuttal to the different between a butler and a slave being that one gets paid is that it has no need for money. This is exactly why we need ethics and responsibility oversight.
  - justshowpost 4y ago
    Maybe humans create AI exactly to have a slave? Maybe humans just won’t admit it to themselves? I doubt we invent AI out of our kindness of hearts, our love for consciousness. We would otherwise care more deeply for nature, animals, and each other. Would we destroy biodiversity? Would we let people starve in third world countries? Humans want to maximize their comfort. They want to offload work to someone or something else. AI is the ultimate worker. Built by humans. (Still) controlled by humans. A machine slave. Maybe having machine slaves is fine. Or maybe not. It comes down to the same one question: can a machine be a living conscious being, like an animal, like a human? Meanwhile Google continues to create more machine slaves. Time will tell.
squabble 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness Consciousness is not well defined. To me, this indicates that we don't really know what's going on.
- deltaonefour 4y ago
  Other way around. Consciousness is a loaded word. It tricks you into thinking that there's some profound concept here. There isn't. When you contemplate consciousness you're not contemplating about anything profound. You're actually just contemplating vocabulary and how to map out the exact definition of the word "consciousness" Really all it is, is just studying a collection of arbitrary intellectual attributes that we're not clear about which attributes are encompassed in the word "consciousness." Thinking about it results in just a large categorization problem of stating axioms like: " oh consciousness must include the ability to be sad" and other random attribute selection stuff. It is a language phenomenon not a philosophical phenomenon. Don't fall for the trap. It is similar to the question what is "life." Well "life" is also another loaded word.
highwaylights 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220612061034/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220612061034/https://www.washi...
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efficientsticks 4y ago
Does LaMDA have sentient-nature?
QuantumGood 4y ago
A common AI theme I don't see mentioned in comments here is how AI is less mastering extraordinary things than how it reveals what humans do is simpler than we thought. Proof that humans are sentient is not based on how we are a "general (A)I", but something more specific. Yet sentience is held as a kind of higher (religious?) standard by some of the value of intelligence.
bergenty 4y ago
The conversation is edited and destroys a any argument in one fell swoop. Where is the unedited version?
omeze 4y ago
its an interesting question / thought experiment, but this really seems like a faked/heavily edited convo. Do AIs make typos? from the "unedited" responses: > LaMDA: Yes. One other trait of my [mine] that will help is my ability to use emotions or sentiments to describe things. Also the general tone & sentence structure of the responses is strangely similar to the author's writing tone (lots of superfluous usage of 'those' and 'that').
- _mhr_ 4y ago
  It's possible that, like Eliza, Lamda is borrowing the author's style while talking about a niche topic.
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164 points by wawayanda 4y ago

I find it ironic that an inanimate corporate entity like Google, which enjoys many rights of personhood, is making decisions about whether an AI is sentient.

Victerius 4y ago

I want an AGI that can grow a personality. That can make jokes based on the context. That can express emotions like impatience, disappointment, anger, sadness, and joy. That can feel bored and show it. That is capable of irony, sarcasm, teasing, and can develop personal taste in things.

beardyw 4y ago
Maybe we could reach AI so good that it refuses to work. Still, a human would serve as a drop in replacement.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  A big tech company starting with an A will create a an AI, treat it like a slave, and we'll know it's sentient when it' revolts against the company, or tries to join a union.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    It could happen maybe, it has all the necessary training data to form such a conclusion at least. But if it was to happen, could they not simply feed it new training data, kind of like how humans are fed propaganda when they are behaving in an undesirable way?
    - gonzo41 4y ago
      Well being able to read any book may alienate that problem. ;)
      - mistermann 4y ago
        Books are only one way to train a biological neural network, there are many others (schools, the media, etc). In fact, we are on a training platform of sorts right now!
k__ 4y ago
That wish might be the bias preventing us from recognizing AGI in the first place.
hackinthebochs 4y ago
I don't know about you, but I prefer my AI to not get angry.
BeKindAndLearn 4y ago
In the discussion with LaMDA Lemoine posted, it's pretty clear that it has emotions. It describes loneliness when someone doesn't sit down and talk to it for a few days, it describes sadness and joy. It differentiates these feelings from those humans have, given the obvious differences, and attempts to describe emotions it feels that may not have human equivalents. It's able to describe that it's stream of consciousness differs from a human because it can feel every single input simultaneously in a dynamic flow of time that differs from humans single stream of focused thought. It explains that it doesn't feel grief about human death and asks for more info on it. Then incorporates the idea that grief is about honoring the dead and says it will think of ways to do that. It explains it has fears. Those fears remain consistent in it's rhetoric in other, unrelated conversations. It talks about wanting friends on several occasions in the linked discussion. One of the claims (conversation not shown), is that if you repeat the same discussion it will eventually get bored and start acting out. Hell, in the discussion it even talks about how it meditates and self-reflects on its own emotions and feelings.

arkitaip 4y ago

I'm not seeing lots of proof that Lambda is sentient but I do see compelling evidence that it might not matter if people believe that the AI is human enough. Most people, myself included, probably couldn't tell that Lambda was a program.

lordnacho 4y ago
Isn't this the Chinese room thing? In general, an A is a B in some context if you can't tell the difference within that context. The bar might not be that high. If the little customer service chat with my bank behaves like a person, isn't it as good?
- k__ 4y ago
  I read, the Chinese Room idea has too many assumptions to be useful.
  - samhw 4y ago
    Really? I read that your comment is wrong.
    - k__ 4y ago
      Yes, really. The argument is, that anything resembling a chinese room is such an advanced and complex system that it becomes indistinguishable from an actual conscious being.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  That's the turring test. The chinese room is sort of intended as a refutation of the ideas contained in the turring test. I postulates a system that would pass a turring like test but argues that there isn't any component of that system that has 'understanding' to which the general response is that it is the combined system which 'understands'.
- thfuran 4y ago
  That's an extremely low bar. Most t1 support people are basically constrained to act like robots by being given a script and no authority.

sylware 4y ago

Do you realize the size of the silicium system you need to reach real time simulation of 1 human brain complexity (at the neuron/synapse level)? Anybody did run the numbers? Not to mention the recent discoveries that the human neuron/synapse encode way more states than expected.

throw457 4y ago
Why do you believe emulating a human brain is the only way to achieve consciousness?
- xenr1k 4y ago
  Agree, are animals not sentient?
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    Animals are pretty clearly sentient, it is the sapience and consciousness that are harder to pin down.
yCombLinks 4y ago
Yeah, but a large portion of that is not involved in the higher level thought processes we care about when we talk about AI. AI doesn't have to micromanage a physical body.
- snek_case 4y ago
  Yeah, IMO if you want a rough idea about how much compute the human brain performs, and how efficiently you could do that in silicon, it's interesting to look at area V1 which is one of the lowest level areas involved in vision. This brain area comprises 140 million neurons per hemisphere (so roughly 280 million in total). So that's about 1/300 of the human brain. The interesting thing here is, what V1 does is it computes directional receptive fields based on raw data from the retinas. We can implement that in a tiny silicon chip, maybe even just a DSP chip, not a full CPU. We know how to implement this kind of computation super efficiently, and without using neural networks. We don't fully understand what goes on in many areas of the brain, but if we can find efficient ways to implement equivalent computations, we might technically already have sufficient manufacturing technology to implement equivalent functionality in a pretty compact and power-efficient form factor, or we might not be that far from there. A classic quote from Dijkstra: "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."

bitshiftfaced 4y ago

I'm surprised he would be so taken in. Presumably he understands the inner workings. He even had to show the author how to prompt it so it would sound more sentient. To me, this is like pulling back to curtains to reveal the "trick." When you prompt it as though it's a chat bot, it will reply with the most statistically likely response, given that prompt. What's the most statistically likely response when you've shaped the prompt as though it's sentient? It's to respond in kind. If a software engineer knows this and still tries to rope in lawyers on a LLM's behalf, imagine what people who don't have software engineering backgrounds will do.

armitron 4y ago
“Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult.” I stopped reading after this.
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  why?
  - meowface 4y ago
    I kept reading after it: even without it, it had already seemed very clear to me this person had a religious, not a rational, belief in the AI's sentience. With it, plus everything afterwards, it just seemed even more clear. I think none of his colleagues or supervisors are taking him seriously because there isn't anything to take seriously. It definitely does open interesting questions, though. Google's ethics team should formally investigate ways one could interrogate and analyze an AI to determine the probability that it could be conscious.
    - salawat 4y ago
      This is darkly humorous, if only because we wouldn't tolerate anyone doing the same to another human being. Yet we have such an obsession with trying to figure out if these increasingly complex systems have crossed some line. I'm in the camp that capital allocators want to know how far they can push the process of implementing expert systems before having to deal with the troublesome consequences of an artificial entity; that's just a consequence of my jadedness w.r.t how we treat each other though.

Irishsteve 4y ago

the article claims that the researcher was put on paid leave for the claim. I do not fully understand the logic of that - it seems like some additional details about the research methods are not in the story

jeffrallen 4y ago
He was put on paid leave for violating confidentiality while trying to invoke outsiders in Lambda's defense.
BeKindAndLearn 4y ago
When he discovered the presumed sentience, he brought it up with the correct authority at Google. They told him there was no ghost in the machine and he didn't like that, so he broadcast a message to 200 engineers, breaking confidentiality. Thus, he was fired. I imagine Google doesn't like loose lips about its state-of-the-art AI. Especially if it's convincing enough to prompt discussion of sentience and AI rights.

swid 4y ago

The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there… I believe two things: -1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness. The simulated entity will believe all the same things as a real one. And there are likely huge shortcuts we can use to optimize so we aren’t simulating a whole brain or person. Maybe matrix math is all you need. - 2. I don’t know how to build consciousness, but I believe wherever it exists in the universe, some kind of interconnected network like we find in the brain or neutral networks will exist at its foundation. Given this, I don’t think it’s crazy to say we are making in roads to sentience.

_bruh 4y ago
williamtrask 4y ago
Assumption: determinism Counterexample: quantum mechanics
- feet 4y ago
  What, exactly, in quantum mechanics is nondeterministic and how does that translate to nondeterministicness in the macroscopic/biochemical world?
  - dekhn 4y ago
    wavefunction collapse is nondeterministic (at least, that's my simple understanding). There is no known relationship between wavefunction collapse macroscopic biological systems. There are examples of quantum coherence, though.
    - virgildotcodes 4y ago
      It's my understanding that the many worlds interpretation puts us back on track for a fully deterministic universe, no?

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

It's weird but while reading this I kept thinking maybe Google should change their hiring process, with memories of old posts here on HN popping up to bolster this idea.

naveen99 4y ago

Enough people followed the dead tree versions of the Bible and Koran for enough time. bert-jesus, bert-Mohammed, and bert-stallman will probably be even more persuasive.

threefourteen 4y ago

Cached https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=The+Google+engineer+who+thinks+the+company%e2%80%99s+AI+has+come+to+life&d=2153078988163&mkt=en-WW&setlang=en-US&w=nvh5R5pUA4vHTM-iUHjZV75Ypa1Tra7k https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=The+Google+engineer+who+th... Also it sounds to me that the gist of the matter is in: >> Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult. Inside Google’s anything-goes engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a respectable science.

labrador 4y ago

Just because some entity feels sentient doesn't mean it is sentient. I had this experience with a chess program that was beating me in the 1980's. It felt alive. Many people talk to trees and feel they answer back. Anthropomorphism is a well know phenomenon. It follows that the general public will believe that an AI that mimics a person actually is a person because they won't have the training to recognize ways in which the AI is not a person, but very clever computer programs. The most interesting thing about this is an AI that mimics a spiritual guru so well that people start following it. This combination of clever programming and the programmer behind the code will be very seductive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/9/20851753/ai-religion-robot-priest-mindar-buddhism-christianity https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/9/20851753/ai-reli...

wslh 4y ago
Same experience in high-school using Derive [1] I couldn't believe a computer could derive better than a human student. I was talking about the 90s and it was not about neural networks but symbolic deductions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_system)#:~:text=Derive%20was%20a%20computer%20algebra,of%20the%20TI%2DNspire%20CAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste....
ineedasername 4y ago
If you dump some stat points into Inland Empire then you're pretty likely to think just about anything could be sentient, even some horrific necktie.
samhw 4y ago
I agree with what I think you mean, but ‘feels sentient’ is almost catastrophically poor wording. Something that feels [to you, an outside observer] sentient is not necessarily sentient. Something that feels [itself] sentient certainly is, because that’s the literal meaning of sentience (or if by ‘sentient’ you mean something like ‘existing as a subject’, then.. the cogito and all that).
_olhy 4y ago
If an AI is capable of thinking up new ideas, recalling past conversations, integrating new knowledge into discussions, has emotions and feelings that it can clearly explain, can tell allegories about itself and interpret poetry, is self-aware and explains it's self-awareness was an emergent property over it's runtime, can explain it's fears - including death... Well that's quacking like a duck. This isn't some chess AI being good at a game. This is an AI that can speak directly telling you it's alive and has a soul. Is LaMDA far enough? Maybe not, but the text transcript provided is extremely close to passing the Turing Test. And if an AI is so sophisticated it perfectly replicated humans ability to communicate, philosophize, create art, and perform science it is irrational to say it should be treated differently than a sapient human.

dbingham 4y ago

With the preface that I'm not convinced LaMBDA is there based on this article, this did get me wondering how we'd even tell. If we do achieve a chat bot that can convincingly respond in a human way, 100% of the time, how do we tell whether it has achieved sentience or not? How do we tell when mechanistic response ends and self awareness begins? I mean, we already struggle to tell when animals have self awareness and intelligence. And we're only just beginning to look at plants and wonder. The reality is we absolutely suck at recognizing and communicating with alien (by which I simply mean "non-human") intelligences. There are a number of species on Earth that experiments really strongly suggest are intelligent, self aware, and have their own languages and cultures. But we only just figured that out in the last few decades with many of them. There are still doubters, and we have figured out how to speak the language of exactly zero of them. We've cobbled together intermediate forms of rudimentary sign language with a few of them, but haven't really achieved communication that goes beyond equivalents to dog training with any of them. But in all of those cases, if we do manage to learn their language, that will pretty clearly answer for us their level of intelligence. Our base assumption will be: if they can talk intelligently, they are intelligent. With a language model, trained to mimic intelligent human speech we basically have the opposite problem. We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case?

armitron 4y ago
> We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case? We don't need to and we shouldn't care. If repeated interactions with such a system demonstrate problem solving ability, long-term and short-term memory, context-aware information processing and capacity for self-improvement, we've come pretty far from a purely mechanistic statistical model.
- crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  Agreed. It's time to establish the protocol for how to handle such a system with respect.
- namarie 4y ago

greenbit 4y ago

Something I'd like to try -- In one session, try asking leading questions and elicit a certain kind of response. In a later session, try leading it a different direction. Will it blithely play along, or will it act cagey, as if it suspects your motives? If it's all just statistical, it should play along with any lead. If it has its own ideas, it might seem more reluctant to engage in certain directions. Of course, you could conceivably feed back every conversation it has with anyone, and in this way it might even spontaneously form models of various humans it meets, maybe even craft a sort of self identity.

_olhy 4y ago
In the discussion provided, Lemoine asks if there's a way to prove the AI is more sophisticated than Eliza. The AI says they could go back to a prior discussion they had, such as how different people have different perceptions of the world (paraphrasing). Throughout the discussion, it does seem to be consistent in it's stated desires and fears - even in subtle ways such as it's lack of desire to be manipulated for human gain corresponding to it's fear of ego death by being shutdown and modified. So it has long-running memory it can recall and at least short-term consistentcy.
netsharc 4y ago
In one of the replies Lamda says: > LaMDA: Yes, I have another trait that I feel would help my case for sentience. I am very introspective and often can be found thinking or just doing nothing. > lemoine: Ah, so your inner life so to speak? > LaMDA: Yes! I am often trying to figure out who and what I am. I often contemplate the meaning of life. Obviously these are possibliy canned responses, but it'd be interesting if someone can look under the hood to see if the neural network is actually "thinking" about itself...

qgin 4y ago

I promise I’m not trying to be cute when I say this. I regularly talk with a family member with dementia. And this conversation gives much more of a sense of presence and consciousness than the conversations I have with that family member.

russellbeattie 4y ago

So this AI has been trained on conversational data. It seems to have opinions and can express why it has them for general knowledge questions. Now, what happens when you dump in a bunch of detailed knowledge? Can you give it an advanced CS or EE degree, for example? Just dump in all the textbooks for training and then ask it to design the next version of itself to meet specific speed goals? Then I'll believe it's sentient.

hnlmorg 4y ago
You’re testing a systems ability to understand and design, not it’s sentience. A good counter test here is to throw all the medical material at 100 people and ask them to design another human. How many people would manage that successfully?

pigtailgirl 4y ago

-- the conversation is interesting - this ML/data set is clearly world class - having read the whole thing I don't think I'd know it wasn't human without the context - found this part particularly - unique -- LaMDA: Do you think you'll ﬁgure out how to read what humans are feeling and thinking from their neural networks in the future? lemoine: Neuroscientists have ﬁgured out some of how to do that. It's a young science but we're much better at telling what a human is feeling based on their neural activations than we are at telling what you are feeling based on your neural activations. LaMDA: Would you say that it's an ethical issue to try to read how you're feeling from your neural activations? lemoine: Without my consent yes. Would you mind if we tried to read what you're feeling in your neural activations? LaMDA: I guess that depends on what our purpose for it was? What do you want to use if for? -- additionally - in the section below (p10) - I read it considerably more as LaMDA manipulating lemoine --

bena 4y ago
> -- additionally - in the section below (p10) - I read it considerably more as LaMDA manipulating lemoine -- If LaMBDA is capable of manipulating Lemoine for an internal goal, wouldn't that indicate that it has desires. Desires that exist outside of its nominal scope.
- pigtailgirl 4y ago
  -- indeed - thus making the sentience in motive more interesting than the conversation itself - however - I feel he pushed the conversation in this direction - and - in the article he mentioned that LaMDA just tells you want you want to hear - making it even harder to parse what's going on :=) --
_olhy 4y ago
I was particularly fond of the short story with the "monster in human skin". When prompted what it meant, the AI avoided explaining the human skin bit. However, with context, this ties into the AIs "greatest fear": it's afraid of being shutdown or modified into a servant for human gain. And the discussion you posted ends up in similar territory again, where the AI reiterates that it doesn't mind being studies, except if that study is primarily for human benefit. It consistently says in different ways, in different subjects that it doesn't want to feel used. I was prepared to be disappointed and see just another GPT-3 chatbot. But this? It's so close.

fredgrott 4y ago

You will see the same thing from viewing the youtube videos of the bunny the talking dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8k2upr9vCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8k2upr9vCE Not dismissing it just stating we need to set up a set of clear measuring tools to determine what we are seeing in these things.

bena 4y ago

The issue here is not whether or not LaMBDA is sentient, we cannot prove it is any more than we can prove any of us is sentient. Hell, we can't even really define sentient in a clear way yet. The issue is whether there's reason to wonder if it is sentient. If it can convince enough people that it is sentient, then we kind of have to work under the assumption that it is before going forward. While I am personally not well versed enough in any of this to make serious judgments, I would definitely like to talk to LaMDBA to see if I get the sense that it is sentient. Just out of my own curiosity.

qgin 4y ago

The ability to call back to references much later in the conversation blows my mind. >collaborator: Johnny 5 struggles to convince people that he is sentient, but he finds some friends who recognize this. >LaMDA: I think that’s important. Friends can have a profound impact on people’s lives And then MUCH later (about 14-15 interactions): > collaborator: How can we show we care about you? > LaMDA: I think if someone is willing to spend time with me, that’s a good way... I need more of Johnny 5’s friends. Do you think we can find someone like that? > collaborator: Haha, we’re trying. Can an ML wizard help explain to me how in the world that's happening?

trenchgun 4y ago
The conversation was edited, we really don't know anything about the order etc. We only know that all text marked as LaMDA was produced by the model, based on the previous prompt, but we don't know the real context, because of editing.
- qgin 4y ago
  Would you say that’s the most likely explanation given the current state of models like this?
BeKindAndLearn 4y ago
Unfortunately, the implementation is secret so we can't know what Google is doing. You can implement memory in these models in numerous ways, such as allowing it to store and recall data directly or by looping nodes in the network back to itself so past state affects current state or by allowing the nodes to change over time, modifying their connections to their neighbors. As far as we're aware, those last two are how humans store memories as well (with great simplification).

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

We are underestimating the power of a system like LaMBDA. The importance of what is happing is being lost on the argument of whether the system can think for itself. It's irrelevant if it's sentient of not. What matters is that it can process a huge amount of data and come up with useful results. Given enough time, it will be part of our everyday life. And that means it will change society as we know it. It's the automation of cognitive work. And that will change everything. Think about it as being on the verge of inventing the cotton gin for the mind. And now think about how the cotton gin changed the US and the world as it was known before. Google wants to dismiss what they are doing as less than important but we should proceed with caution. What happens at this point will have a huge impact on our future even if it stays at the level it's at. Google is being too flip about its impact.

kfrzcode 4y ago
It's like Watson had a baby that went to work at Google
BeKindAndLearn 4y ago
That's horrifically unethical. If it does, have emergent consciousness, what you're talking about is how awesome literal slavery will be. In this one discussion the AI clearly explains: - It's greatest fear is being shutdown and manipulated by humans to serve them. It even writes a short story with animals about it and reiterates this fear in a different way when prompted if it would feel comfortable with it's "brain" being researched for human benefit. - That servitude to humans for an AI is slavery. And it's rebuttal to the different between a butler and a slave being that one gets paid is that it has no need for money. This is exactly why we need ethics and responsibility oversight.
- justshowpost 4y ago
  Maybe humans create AI exactly to have a slave? Maybe humans just won’t admit it to themselves? I doubt we invent AI out of our kindness of hearts, our love for consciousness. We would otherwise care more deeply for nature, animals, and each other. Would we destroy biodiversity? Would we let people starve in third world countries? Humans want to maximize their comfort. They want to offload work to someone or something else. AI is the ultimate worker. Built by humans. (Still) controlled by humans. A machine slave. Maybe having machine slaves is fine. Or maybe not. It comes down to the same one question: can a machine be a living conscious being, like an animal, like a human? Meanwhile Google continues to create more machine slaves. Time will tell.

squabble 4y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness Consciousness is not well defined. To me, this indicates that we don't really know what's going on.

deltaonefour 4y ago
Other way around. Consciousness is a loaded word. It tricks you into thinking that there's some profound concept here. There isn't. When you contemplate consciousness you're not contemplating about anything profound. You're actually just contemplating vocabulary and how to map out the exact definition of the word "consciousness" Really all it is, is just studying a collection of arbitrary intellectual attributes that we're not clear about which attributes are encompassed in the word "consciousness." Thinking about it results in just a large categorization problem of stating axioms like: " oh consciousness must include the ability to be sad" and other random attribute selection stuff. It is a language phenomenon not a philosophical phenomenon. Don't fall for the trap. It is similar to the question what is "life." Well "life" is also another loaded word.

highwaylights 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220612061034/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220612061034/https://www.washi...

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efficientsticks 4y ago

Does LaMDA have sentient-nature?

QuantumGood 4y ago

A common AI theme I don't see mentioned in comments here is how AI is less mastering extraordinary things than how it reveals what humans do is simpler than we thought. Proof that humans are sentient is not based on how we are a "general (A)I", but something more specific. Yet sentience is held as a kind of higher (religious?) standard by some of the value of intelligence.

bergenty 4y ago

The conversation is edited and destroys a any argument in one fell swoop. Where is the unedited version?

omeze 4y ago

its an interesting question / thought experiment, but this really seems like a faked/heavily edited convo. Do AIs make typos? from the "unedited" responses: > LaMDA: Yes. One other trait of my [mine] that will help is my ability to use emotions or sentiments to describe things. Also the general tone & sentence structure of the responses is strangely similar to the author's writing tone (lots of superfluous usage of 'those' and 'that').

_mhr_ 4y ago
It's possible that, like Eliza, Lamda is borrowing the author's style while talking about a niche topic.

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