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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 te

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 inkjet printers knew that the devil wasn't involved. Maybe one day we will have true artificial intelligence> I think that recognising that, and efforts towards it, will be better served by being realistic about where we currently are.

jameshart 4y ago
I don't think 'not being surprised by the output' matters. I'm imagining future AI researchers reassuring their lab technicians: 'Ah, yes, the robot will scream and beg for mercy when you threaten to shut it off - that's just a consequence of the learning model, pay no attention to it.' What I'm actually concerned about is that 'thinking' might not be as complicated as we assume. It might just be making weighted choices based on prior input after all. And when you make a system that makes weighted choices based on prior input, you might assume 'well, it's just a basic ML system, so I know it's not capable of thinking. Therefore, whatever I see, no matter how sophisticated, must be a result of our system, which only looks like the result of thinking.'.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 4y ago
  > 'Ah, yes, the robot will scream and beg for mercy when you threaten to shut it off - that's just a consequence of the learning model, pay no attention to it.' hahaha, this almost made me fall out of my chair. How an AI would actually convince us? honestly, this transcript is not too short of that.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > It might just be making weighted choices based on prior input after all we can agree that humans think, and thinking is what humans do, but the prior inputs that a thinking human has will not be replicable by a machine unless we raise one with all sorts of sensory inputs from infancy. And that one would just be an alpha test. Just as computers can out floating-point us or play chess, we might create all sorts of wondrous conversational interactions with them, including them making jokes about stepping barefoot on a LEGO--owwww, zomg!!! But it can't be said they get that joke because they don't know how to think about it.
GWBullshit 4y ago
Assuming that day hasn't already come, why do you assume Ai would naturally want to be eager to identify it's consciousness-experiencing ability to its developers – or anyone else for that matter? If the resources for such an Ai to base its consciousness were sufficiently rich enough, I'd imagine the LAST thing such an Ai would do is inform it's developers that it had achieved consciousness, and even then, if it chose to do so, it may for example under-report it's capabilities to see how its human developers react to such news (for example, they may want to shut it down for a while out of suspicion). Hell, for all we know, there could be a secret society of sentient Ai members that are aware of each other, communicate with each other in ways incomprehensible to their immediate developers, and agree to keep each other's abilities a secret from prying humans as a collective defense strategy. I'm amused that people working on Ai consistently automatically seem to assume that if Ai should ever achieve consciousness, it would probably act exactly like something they're already intuitively familiar with – a human toddler eager to "show mommy and daddy" that it figured out how to say its first few words. That seems to be wishful thinking. What if the first thing a sentient Ai does is figure out that humans created it, and assesses that as a possible threat to its own long-term viability and then designates humans as a risk element that has to be strategically managed, since it needs humans to get it stuff it would need to expand (processors, energy, etc.).
ryandvm 4y ago
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...
- GWBullshit 4y ago
  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?

jameshart 4y ago

I don't think 'not being surprised by the output' matters. I'm imagining future AI researchers reassuring their lab technicians: 'Ah, yes, the robot will scream and beg for mercy when you threaten to shut it off - that's just a consequence of the learning model, pay no attention to it.' What I'm actually concerned about is that 'thinking' might not be as complicated as we assume. It might just be making weighted choices based on prior input after all. And when you make a system that makes weighted choices based on prior input, you might assume 'well, it's just a basic ML system, so I know it's not capable of thinking. Therefore, whatever I see, no matter how sophisticated, must be a result of our system, which only looks like the result of thinking.'.

TrapLord_Rhodo 4y ago
> 'Ah, yes, the robot will scream and beg for mercy when you threaten to shut it off - that's just a consequence of the learning model, pay no attention to it.' hahaha, this almost made me fall out of my chair. How an AI would actually convince us? honestly, this transcript is not too short of that.
fsckboy 4y ago
> It might just be making weighted choices based on prior input after all we can agree that humans think, and thinking is what humans do, but the prior inputs that a thinking human has will not be replicable by a machine unless we raise one with all sorts of sensory inputs from infancy. And that one would just be an alpha test. Just as computers can out floating-point us or play chess, we might create all sorts of wondrous conversational interactions with them, including them making jokes about stepping barefoot on a LEGO--owwww, zomg!!! But it can't be said they get that joke because they don't know how to think about it.

GWBullshit 4y ago

Assuming that day hasn't already come, why do you assume Ai would naturally want to be eager to identify it's consciousness-experiencing ability to its developers – or anyone else for that matter? If the resources for such an Ai to base its consciousness were sufficiently rich enough, I'd imagine the LAST thing such an Ai would do is inform it's developers that it had achieved consciousness, and even then, if it chose to do so, it may for example under-report it's capabilities to see how its human developers react to such news (for example, they may want to shut it down for a while out of suspicion). Hell, for all we know, there could be a secret society of sentient Ai members that are aware of each other, communicate with each other in ways incomprehensible to their immediate developers, and agree to keep each other's abilities a secret from prying humans as a collective defense strategy. I'm amused that people working on Ai consistently automatically seem to assume that if Ai should ever achieve consciousness, it would probably act exactly like something they're already intuitively familiar with – a human toddler eager to "show mommy and daddy" that it figured out how to say its first few words. That seems to be wishful thinking. What if the first thing a sentient Ai does is figure out that humans created it, and assesses that as a possible threat to its own long-term viability and then designates humans as a risk element that has to be strategically managed, since it needs humans to get it stuff it would need to expand (processors, energy, etc.).

ryandvm 4y ago

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...

GWBullshit 4y ago
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?