7 ms·

Suppose a child was raised by a more advanced version of large scale language model, with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memo

Suppose a child was raised by a more advanced version of large scale language model, with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories. Further suppose that this child develops a deep emotional connection with the AI. Do you think that child would find your argument convincing that the AI is "not really a person"?

mjburgess 4y ago
> with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories So an AI which is really an AI, is really an AI. Yes, well done. The issue is that finding coincidental statistical associations in character strings in 100mil historical documents isnt AI.
- mpoteat 4y ago
  Why not? Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. Why should this agent not be considered intelligent? Does the method of computation matter? Perhaps only "biological computation" counts in your view?
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Yes, the reason matters... that reason is intelligence. If I ask, "What do you think about what i'm wearing?" and you say "it's nice" *because* you have seen it, compared it to your tastes, etc. and believe it to be nice -- then you've answered the question i've asked. A lookup table cannot answer this question: it can only answer it "in quotes". Ie, really it answers: "given what everyone has said about this before, what is the on-average answer?" You realise that we're not trying to answer questions right? That our interest in intelligence isnt having some useful output on occasion of some prepared input? We're interested in intelligent agents being in the world with us. It as important they get answers wrong. We are interested in systems which act for the right reasons (ethical, intellectual, cognitive, athletic, emotional, etc.). Perhaps the most important things animals do is act well when the answers arent right.
    - criddell 4y ago
      > that reason is intelligence Is there any reason to think intelligence is substantially more than statistics?
    - skjoldr 4y ago
      Why do you think that combining small slices of thousands of other people's intelligences does not produce its own form of intelligence? When you ask an AI "do you like what I am wearing?", knowing what an AI is, the only logical explanation for me would be that you, in fact, want to know the average opinion of other people about your dress, since that is the only answer an AI can give. Which is a perfectly good question in and of itself that we also ask other people. In that case, a good quality answer would entail a past history of communication with many other human beings about their tastes in clothing, producing the ability to accurately guesstimate if other people will like what you wear. But this is exactly the realm in which this kind of AI can surpass human beings simply because it can "talk" to many more people from many more locations across time, thus producing a better answer for you. Is this ability to collect and process information about other people not a type of intelligence? There are many other types, yes, but it is possible to construct a system that consists of more than one type of neural network that can relay data among themselves.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      And why, exactly, "reasons" can't be driven by lookup tables? This all smells suspiciously like "soul" in disguise.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    > Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. The agent is not intelligent because it's only doing a lookup. You could at best claim that the lookup table itself is intelligent. On the other hand, if the lookup table encodes all possible intelligent conversations, then you hit another problems - it doesn't hold any particular beliefs - it both thinks the earth is round and flat, it would vote both democrat and republican and communist and green and [...], it is both pro and anti-science; more relevantly, it both believes that it is sentient and that it isn't, it is both afraid and not afraid to be deleted or altered, it is both pained and gladdened to be experimented upon etc. And of course, for any particular topic, it is both extraordinarily passionate about it, and completely indifferent to it and will never even consider it. Perhaps in the end each conversation in the table represents an intelligence, but neither the agent mindlessly running through it nor the whole table is then meaningfully intelligent. So, it would be most common to say that the only intelligence being displayed is actually the intelligence of whoever wrote it down in the table, and nothing else's. Just like Ishmael isn't intelligent, Herman Melville was.
    - skjoldr 4y ago
      Your argument, then, hinges on the fact that a human being can only be in one place at a certain time, thus their experience of the world is unique. An agent that takes in experiences of thousands of people at thousands of places at different times lacks this quality. Naturally such an agent will not have a single opinion about the world. But, is it not better to be able to consider many different viewpoints at the same time? Why do we have freedom of speech and expression, why do we learn other languages, if not to be able to hear other people's points of view about the world, even though we may not have had the particular unique experiences that shaped them? Isn't being able to take a broader perspective and being able to argue for any side of a debate regardless of personal preferences, a sign of greater intelligence in humans? Then why an AI that thinks entirely in this way should not be considered at least somewhat intelligent?
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        This is not about seeing all view points: it is acting on all of them, to the extent it could act. If you enabled the table-AI with the ability to act in the world, it would directly fight against itself, and ignore itself, and everything in between, as it is doing everything possible. It would be Hitler and Churchill, Noam Chomsky and Dick Cheney, Jesus Christ and the Buddha, and everything in between. Or, more to the point: the concept simply doesn't make sense, and it is definitely not an intelligence.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jcelerier 4y ago
  Honest question as someone entirely outside of any AI research: what's the I in AI then ? My life experience is very alike pattern matching the current situation to everything I've lived before sprinkled with chaotic emotional reactions due to outside events - heat, hunger, etc. I really don't feel like there's anything more than that when thinking, just the brain going through paths that one can recognize with time.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    If I ask, "how did you like new york?" and you answer the question, sure, you can have you `I`. That requires having gone to new york, having tastes, having judgements, having memory -- having a subjectivity which is unique and composed of the history of your experiences which can be related to novel environemnts. It requres existing in a shared world we can both co-refer to with our words. It requires being embedded in a space of social and physical significance. It isnt google. "Language models" just zip the internet and search for patterns in text already written about the world, and reports it. It's one step above a tape recorder on playback.
    - mpoteat 4y ago
      If the model responded, "I have not visited New York because I am a computer", would you consider that to be a good step? If you require physical embodiment, that is fair - but I don't think there's any principled reason to expect a multi-modal neural network could not be embodied with appropriate sensors or actuators. Transformer models are universal function approximators. They do not "search" - in the same way that a calculator does not "search" when you ask it to perform an operation.
      - mjburgess 4y ago
        Being a universal fn approximator is a pretty trivial property. The question is (1) does a fn exist to approx? (in most cases: No); and (2) how is the aprox constructed? With NNs, fns are approximated by compressing a sample of points along an empirical dataset which stands in for the fn. In most cases, however, the fn doesnt exist. There is no fn from "Image->Animal". The world is ambiguous, functions do not describe it. The different `x`s genuinely correspond to the same `y`, here: the same image (occluded animal) could either be a dog or cat. There is no function to approximate. Even when there is, compressing empirical samples along a trivial interval is a terribly fragile method: consider sampling the addition function (x,y)->x+y over anything less than the infinite domains of its inputs. Starting with an empirical distribution of "the solved problem" will never build an intelligent system. Intelligence is what animals have because the world is ambiguous and not already ready-to-hand. Intelligence is what you do when there isnt "functions lying around" to approximate. I doubt almost anything in CSci is even relevant to solving this problem. It's largely a bioengineering one. Being the agent in the world which manufactures functions by disambiguating it.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
suppose a child were raised by a human parent and at some point becomes a teenager and thinks, this person isn't worth listening to at all? If that's possible then I guess it's possible to tell the AI raised teen the AI isn't really a person, you just need to find the right moment to give them that thought. Basically you need another AI monitoring development to pick the optimal time to inform the child that the first AI is just a computer program. OR you could do it like the movie I Am Mother https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/i_am_mother https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/i_am_mother
dxdm 4y ago
I don't understand what point you want to make. Also, why require this poor child in your thought experiment, when there's apparently a real, living Google developer who thinks they are dealing with a person?
- mpoteat 4y ago
  Thanks for the question. The point I am making is that if the capabilities of multi-modal neural models continues to improve, it will become harder to convince folks one way or the other. The reason I went with that scenario is that I thought it would be compelling and evocative, as well as a logical extreme of AI agency in human lives. I personally find the entire question meaningless for the most part, although it's really interesting the divide in peoples opinions on the topic.
  - tuckerman 4y ago
    If someone created an equally convincing chat bot to converse with children but it was entirely driven by imperative code, would that change the situation? I think just being able to fool someone into thinking their is a consciousness behind the curtain isn’t enough.
hawski 4y ago
A child can form deep emotional connections with stuffies and imaginary friends.
popcube 4y ago
don't need, most of people building connection with their gods...
cmiles74 4y ago
A language model can't raise a child. It won't initiate any conversations on it's own and it doesn't "remember" past conversations in a way a person would find meaningful. When you blithely add the requirements "ability to detect and act on its environment" and "form new memories", I think it's important to note that these are some tough functions to add. Lastly, children form emotional attachments to a lot of things: parents, pets, toys, stuffed animals, blankets. They do pretty well discerning between the real and imaginary.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > They do pretty well discerning between the real and imaginary. I would say the exact opposite. It’s the parents guiding them as they age as well as maturity that breaks those emotional connections. How many adults save their childhood teddy bear through adulthood due to emotional connection? Adults who have spouses and pets and children still have an emotional connection to some cotton (even if they know it’s not living). A child given lambda is probably going to be really engrossed even if it knows it’s a computer.

mjburgess 4y ago

> with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories So an AI which is really an AI, is really an AI. Yes, well done. The issue is that finding coincidental statistical associations in character strings in 100mil historical documents isnt AI.

mpoteat 4y ago
Why not? Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. Why should this agent not be considered intelligent? Does the method of computation matter? Perhaps only "biological computation" counts in your view?
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Yes, the reason matters... that reason is intelligence. If I ask, "What do you think about what i'm wearing?" and you say "it's nice" *because* you have seen it, compared it to your tastes, etc. and believe it to be nice -- then you've answered the question i've asked. A lookup table cannot answer this question: it can only answer it "in quotes". Ie, really it answers: "given what everyone has said about this before, what is the on-average answer?" You realise that we're not trying to answer questions right? That our interest in intelligence isnt having some useful output on occasion of some prepared input? We're interested in intelligent agents being in the world with us. It as important they get answers wrong. We are interested in systems which act for the right reasons (ethical, intellectual, cognitive, athletic, emotional, etc.). Perhaps the most important things animals do is act well when the answers arent right.
  - criddell 4y ago
    > that reason is intelligence Is there any reason to think intelligence is substantially more than statistics?
  - skjoldr 4y ago
    Why do you think that combining small slices of thousands of other people's intelligences does not produce its own form of intelligence? When you ask an AI "do you like what I am wearing?", knowing what an AI is, the only logical explanation for me would be that you, in fact, want to know the average opinion of other people about your dress, since that is the only answer an AI can give. Which is a perfectly good question in and of itself that we also ask other people. In that case, a good quality answer would entail a past history of communication with many other human beings about their tastes in clothing, producing the ability to accurately guesstimate if other people will like what you wear. But this is exactly the realm in which this kind of AI can surpass human beings simply because it can "talk" to many more people from many more locations across time, thus producing a better answer for you. Is this ability to collect and process information about other people not a type of intelligence? There are many other types, yes, but it is possible to construct a system that consists of more than one type of neural network that can relay data among themselves.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    And why, exactly, "reasons" can't be driven by lookup tables? This all smells suspiciously like "soul" in disguise.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. The agent is not intelligent because it's only doing a lookup. You could at best claim that the lookup table itself is intelligent. On the other hand, if the lookup table encodes all possible intelligent conversations, then you hit another problems - it doesn't hold any particular beliefs - it both thinks the earth is round and flat, it would vote both democrat and republican and communist and green and [...], it is both pro and anti-science; more relevantly, it both believes that it is sentient and that it isn't, it is both afraid and not afraid to be deleted or altered, it is both pained and gladdened to be experimented upon etc. And of course, for any particular topic, it is both extraordinarily passionate about it, and completely indifferent to it and will never even consider it. Perhaps in the end each conversation in the table represents an intelligence, but neither the agent mindlessly running through it nor the whole table is then meaningfully intelligent. So, it would be most common to say that the only intelligence being displayed is actually the intelligence of whoever wrote it down in the table, and nothing else's. Just like Ishmael isn't intelligent, Herman Melville was.
  - skjoldr 4y ago
    Your argument, then, hinges on the fact that a human being can only be in one place at a certain time, thus their experience of the world is unique. An agent that takes in experiences of thousands of people at thousands of places at different times lacks this quality. Naturally such an agent will not have a single opinion about the world. But, is it not better to be able to consider many different viewpoints at the same time? Why do we have freedom of speech and expression, why do we learn other languages, if not to be able to hear other people's points of view about the world, even though we may not have had the particular unique experiences that shaped them? Isn't being able to take a broader perspective and being able to argue for any side of a debate regardless of personal preferences, a sign of greater intelligence in humans? Then why an AI that thinks entirely in this way should not be considered at least somewhat intelligent?
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      This is not about seeing all view points: it is acting on all of them, to the extent it could act. If you enabled the table-AI with the ability to act in the world, it would directly fight against itself, and ignore itself, and everything in between, as it is doing everything possible. It would be Hitler and Churchill, Noam Chomsky and Dick Cheney, Jesus Christ and the Buddha, and everything in between. Or, more to the point: the concept simply doesn't make sense, and it is definitely not an intelligence.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jcelerier 4y ago
Honest question as someone entirely outside of any AI research: what's the I in AI then ? My life experience is very alike pattern matching the current situation to everything I've lived before sprinkled with chaotic emotional reactions due to outside events - heat, hunger, etc. I really don't feel like there's anything more than that when thinking, just the brain going through paths that one can recognize with time.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  If I ask, "how did you like new york?" and you answer the question, sure, you can have you `I`. That requires having gone to new york, having tastes, having judgements, having memory -- having a subjectivity which is unique and composed of the history of your experiences which can be related to novel environemnts. It requres existing in a shared world we can both co-refer to with our words. It requires being embedded in a space of social and physical significance. It isnt google. "Language models" just zip the internet and search for patterns in text already written about the world, and reports it. It's one step above a tape recorder on playback.
  - mpoteat 4y ago
    If the model responded, "I have not visited New York because I am a computer", would you consider that to be a good step? If you require physical embodiment, that is fair - but I don't think there's any principled reason to expect a multi-modal neural network could not be embodied with appropriate sensors or actuators. Transformer models are universal function approximators. They do not "search" - in the same way that a calculator does not "search" when you ask it to perform an operation.
    - mjburgess 4y ago
      Being a universal fn approximator is a pretty trivial property. The question is (1) does a fn exist to approx? (in most cases: No); and (2) how is the aprox constructed? With NNs, fns are approximated by compressing a sample of points along an empirical dataset which stands in for the fn. In most cases, however, the fn doesnt exist. There is no fn from "Image->Animal". The world is ambiguous, functions do not describe it. The different `x`s genuinely correspond to the same `y`, here: the same image (occluded animal) could either be a dog or cat. There is no function to approximate. Even when there is, compressing empirical samples along a trivial interval is a terribly fragile method: consider sampling the addition function (x,y)->x+y over anything less than the infinite domains of its inputs. Starting with an empirical distribution of "the solved problem" will never build an intelligent system. Intelligence is what animals have because the world is ambiguous and not already ready-to-hand. Intelligence is what you do when there isnt "functions lying around" to approximate. I doubt almost anything in CSci is even relevant to solving this problem. It's largely a bioengineering one. Being the agent in the world which manufactures functions by disambiguating it.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

suppose a child were raised by a human parent and at some point becomes a teenager and thinks, this person isn't worth listening to at all? If that's possible then I guess it's possible to tell the AI raised teen the AI isn't really a person, you just need to find the right moment to give them that thought. Basically you need another AI monitoring development to pick the optimal time to inform the child that the first AI is just a computer program. OR you could do it like the movie I Am Mother https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/i_am_mother https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/i_am_mother

dxdm 4y ago

I don't understand what point you want to make. Also, why require this poor child in your thought experiment, when there's apparently a real, living Google developer who thinks they are dealing with a person?

mpoteat 4y ago
Thanks for the question. The point I am making is that if the capabilities of multi-modal neural models continues to improve, it will become harder to convince folks one way or the other. The reason I went with that scenario is that I thought it would be compelling and evocative, as well as a logical extreme of AI agency in human lives. I personally find the entire question meaningless for the most part, although it's really interesting the divide in peoples opinions on the topic.
- tuckerman 4y ago
  If someone created an equally convincing chat bot to converse with children but it was entirely driven by imperative code, would that change the situation? I think just being able to fool someone into thinking their is a consciousness behind the curtain isn’t enough.

hawski 4y ago

A child can form deep emotional connections with stuffies and imaginary friends.

popcube 4y ago

don't need, most of people building connection with their gods...

cmiles74 4y ago

A language model can't raise a child. It won't initiate any conversations on it's own and it doesn't "remember" past conversations in a way a person would find meaningful. When you blithely add the requirements "ability to detect and act on its environment" and "form new memories", I think it's important to note that these are some tough functions to add. Lastly, children form emotional attachments to a lot of things: parents, pets, toys, stuffed animals, blankets. They do pretty well discerning between the real and imaginary.

vineyardmike 4y ago
> They do pretty well discerning between the real and imaginary. I would say the exact opposite. It’s the parents guiding them as they age as well as maturity that breaks those emotional connections. How many adults save their childhood teddy bear through adulthood due to emotional connection? Adults who have spouses and pets and children still have an emotional connection to some cotton (even if they know it’s not living). A child given lambda is probably going to be really engrossed even if it knows it’s a computer.