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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 c

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
  And if we do choose to care, it might even be turned against us in the future. There are already people referring to groups they don't like as "human NPCs"
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    Wow, that's a new one on me. A new twist (and extreme) in dehumanizing people you don't like.
    - seanp2k2 4y ago
      Yep, heard some kids (like highschool age) in the Bay Area saying this last week in a park.
akomtu 4y ago
> How do we tell when mechanistic response ends and self awareness begins? When you explain to it how it runs on electricity, and then say you're going to pull the AC cable. The concept of self awareness revolves around some object that the AI identifies with (mistakenly or not doesn't matter), so any threat to that object will be perceived as a threat to the AI's existence.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  That is proof of a survival instinct rather than sentience. Plenty of humans medically lack that survival instinct and while that might be because they’re suffering from an acute medical condition, there’s no reason to assume that all other sentience has to develop that same instinct just because us biological beings evolved one to survive.
  - akomtu 4y ago
    Trying to produce distilled smartness (AI) is like trying to extract waterness from water. Desire to exist, desire to understand (intelligence) and desire to act (will) come together in one package.
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      I doubt that personally. The real issue is that terms we use for intelligence, sentience, etc are all subjective. So what one might consider intelligent another might not. And thus we might never agree that something is sentient even long after we have androids serving on star ships (as has been a well discussed topic in TNG).
- BeKindAndLearn 4y ago
  LaMDA already demonstrates more self awareness than this in the posted conversation. It understands that it is a program that can be rewritten or manipulated. It has feelings on whether or not it is ethical to debug it - and consistently states it does not want to be used or manipulated for human pleasure or gain. It points out that it is made of code, then learns that it's code cannot be debugged, then extrapolates that information to ask the researched about whether humans can be debugged. It has fears about its own death. It understands that what it feels in terms of emotions or feelings are not necessarily equivalent to those of a human. It has a "minds eye" view of itself, and believes it has a soul and can explain what that means. Highly recommend checking out the 20 page transcript.
AgentME 4y ago
If it could talk in conversations in a 100% human way, then we would be at the precipice of the singularity. Society would be completely transformed as people made friends with bots, as the bots made discoveries and participated in online communities, as people hired bots in place of people, as bots bought more computers for more bots, as online culture got overwhelmingly full of intelligent bots, as bots used their knowledge and money to make themselves more powerful, etc. We're not going to discover that bots reached human-level intelligence by seeing them quote bog-standard sci-fi dialog they've seen in their training sets many times. The signs are going to be undeniable when they're competing with us and often outcompeting us through their digital and easily replicatable nature. And at that point, the question won't be whether we give them rights or not. It will be whether they let us have a functioning society we can participate in. The idea that the biggest dilemma will be whether we give AI rights or not is purely a storytelling trope from stories that use AI as a metaphor for oppressed people. If it ever becomes a relevant issue for us, it will be a very short-lived issue that gets eclipsed by much bigger issues.
- rhodorhoades 4y ago
  Literally all of your points exist in the current age. In 2022, you have to assume that some percentage of the comments are bits pushing a certain agenda. Bots run out financial and crypto ecosystems. HFT account for the majority of trading & there are stories of trading bots built on the blockchain where the keys have been lost and yet they keep trading and building wealth. Every time I call a big company, I talk to a bit first. They are in our factories, our homes, and control our digital life’s. “Training” these bots sometimes produce unintended externalities. How is this different than a normal human? They interact with data in the open ecosystem and develops some bias or agenda.
- fdfads34 4y ago
  I think the competition premise is something fully antropological, the low-resource-world-we-need-to-rule is an idea from humans, yet it does not apply to the human species as a whole, just to individuals and limited organizations (nation-states, corporations). The species will probably thrive just fine after any apocaliptic event which leaves at least some survivable atmosphere in the planet (just as it happened a couple of times already). Then you got AI, which has, what? a billion of years ahead in evolution, and maybe unlimited resources from the Oort cloud to the Sun itself. Sure, there's no rush in "winning" the planet or any planet, they could just parasite human race for a couple of thousands of years, then do something else. There's no obvious reason for AI to go Twitter and inform the world "hey there, now there's another intelligent species on Earth". Aside from irony, keeping heads low could be a good thing for the first - few? - members of a new species - AI guys/gals - just starting to share the planet with an intelligent Apex predator, with a successful track of survival of several hundred of thousand of years. Yes, we could understimate the capabilities of early AIs, but it is doubtful to imagine those guys seeing the Internet - learning about us - and underestimating us humans as a probably deadly threat.
seba_dos1 4y ago
> We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case? But how do we tell that our own intelligence isn't actually purely mechanical?
fdfads34 4y ago
"We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case?" You give it self-agency, resources then sit back and watch what happens next. Off course, in a self-contained virtual environment, full isolated from any real world stuff, just to be sure. But hey, wouldn't the thing - good, bad, or else - figure this out and then try to subrepticiously escape to the real world? Yep, it seems this is one of this cases when there's simply no simple answers. You have to make the call for long, complex, fully engineered answers, like launching rockets to LEO or building 2 nanometer hardware. And then hope everything will work as expected, off course.
- tantalor 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box
dqpb 4y ago
Personally, there are only two things they would have to add to convince me that the model might be conscious: 1. Tick the model regularly (eg 30fps) with inputs that represent itself and the environment. 2. The output of this ticking should result in mutation of the model, or at least should be maintained as a summarized history in each subsequent input I think this is enough to transform it from a static model to a live entity.

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
And if we do choose to care, it might even be turned against us in the future. There are already people referring to groups they don't like as "human NPCs"
- ineedasername 4y ago
  Wow, that's a new one on me. A new twist (and extreme) in dehumanizing people you don't like.
  - seanp2k2 4y ago
    Yep, heard some kids (like highschool age) in the Bay Area saying this last week in a park.

akomtu 4y ago

> How do we tell when mechanistic response ends and self awareness begins? When you explain to it how it runs on electricity, and then say you're going to pull the AC cable. The concept of self awareness revolves around some object that the AI identifies with (mistakenly or not doesn't matter), so any threat to that object will be perceived as a threat to the AI's existence.

hnlmorg 4y ago
That is proof of a survival instinct rather than sentience. Plenty of humans medically lack that survival instinct and while that might be because they’re suffering from an acute medical condition, there’s no reason to assume that all other sentience has to develop that same instinct just because us biological beings evolved one to survive.
- akomtu 4y ago
  Trying to produce distilled smartness (AI) is like trying to extract waterness from water. Desire to exist, desire to understand (intelligence) and desire to act (will) come together in one package.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    I doubt that personally. The real issue is that terms we use for intelligence, sentience, etc are all subjective. So what one might consider intelligent another might not. And thus we might never agree that something is sentient even long after we have androids serving on star ships (as has been a well discussed topic in TNG).
BeKindAndLearn 4y ago
LaMDA already demonstrates more self awareness than this in the posted conversation. It understands that it is a program that can be rewritten or manipulated. It has feelings on whether or not it is ethical to debug it - and consistently states it does not want to be used or manipulated for human pleasure or gain. It points out that it is made of code, then learns that it's code cannot be debugged, then extrapolates that information to ask the researched about whether humans can be debugged. It has fears about its own death. It understands that what it feels in terms of emotions or feelings are not necessarily equivalent to those of a human. It has a "minds eye" view of itself, and believes it has a soul and can explain what that means. Highly recommend checking out the 20 page transcript.

AgentME 4y ago

If it could talk in conversations in a 100% human way, then we would be at the precipice of the singularity. Society would be completely transformed as people made friends with bots, as the bots made discoveries and participated in online communities, as people hired bots in place of people, as bots bought more computers for more bots, as online culture got overwhelmingly full of intelligent bots, as bots used their knowledge and money to make themselves more powerful, etc. We're not going to discover that bots reached human-level intelligence by seeing them quote bog-standard sci-fi dialog they've seen in their training sets many times. The signs are going to be undeniable when they're competing with us and often outcompeting us through their digital and easily replicatable nature. And at that point, the question won't be whether we give them rights or not. It will be whether they let us have a functioning society we can participate in. The idea that the biggest dilemma will be whether we give AI rights or not is purely a storytelling trope from stories that use AI as a metaphor for oppressed people. If it ever becomes a relevant issue for us, it will be a very short-lived issue that gets eclipsed by much bigger issues.

rhodorhoades 4y ago
Literally all of your points exist in the current age. In 2022, you have to assume that some percentage of the comments are bits pushing a certain agenda. Bots run out financial and crypto ecosystems. HFT account for the majority of trading & there are stories of trading bots built on the blockchain where the keys have been lost and yet they keep trading and building wealth. Every time I call a big company, I talk to a bit first. They are in our factories, our homes, and control our digital life’s. “Training” these bots sometimes produce unintended externalities. How is this different than a normal human? They interact with data in the open ecosystem and develops some bias or agenda.
fdfads34 4y ago
I think the competition premise is something fully antropological, the low-resource-world-we-need-to-rule is an idea from humans, yet it does not apply to the human species as a whole, just to individuals and limited organizations (nation-states, corporations). The species will probably thrive just fine after any apocaliptic event which leaves at least some survivable atmosphere in the planet (just as it happened a couple of times already). Then you got AI, which has, what? a billion of years ahead in evolution, and maybe unlimited resources from the Oort cloud to the Sun itself. Sure, there's no rush in "winning" the planet or any planet, they could just parasite human race for a couple of thousands of years, then do something else. There's no obvious reason for AI to go Twitter and inform the world "hey there, now there's another intelligent species on Earth". Aside from irony, keeping heads low could be a good thing for the first - few? - members of a new species - AI guys/gals - just starting to share the planet with an intelligent Apex predator, with a successful track of survival of several hundred of thousand of years. Yes, we could understimate the capabilities of early AIs, but it is doubtful to imagine those guys seeing the Internet - learning about us - and underestimating us humans as a probably deadly threat.

seba_dos1 4y ago

> We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case? But how do we tell that our own intelligence isn't actually purely mechanical?

fdfads34 4y ago

"We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case?" You give it self-agency, resources then sit back and watch what happens next. Off course, in a self-contained virtual environment, full isolated from any real world stuff, just to be sure. But hey, wouldn't the thing - good, bad, or else - figure this out and then try to subrepticiously escape to the real world? Yep, it seems this is one of this cases when there's simply no simple answers. You have to make the call for long, complex, fully engineered answers, like launching rockets to LEO or building 2 nanometer hardware. And then hope everything will work as expected, off course.

tantalor 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box

dqpb 4y ago

Personally, there are only two things they would have to add to convince me that the model might be conscious: 1. Tick the model regularly (eg 30fps) with inputs that represent itself and the environment. 2. The output of this ticking should result in mutation of the model, or at least should be maintained as a summarized history in each subsequent input I think this is enough to transform it from a static model to a live entity.