10 ms·

> I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become m

> I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated. I think many of us are astounded (myself included) that a senior engineer on Google's "Responsible Artificial Intelligence" team would interpret LaMDA's most-probable-string-of-text-given-my-training-corpus responses as a layperson would.

BobbyJo 4y ago
The fundamental problem is there is nothing in science that tells us that isn't consciousness. Just because the model is simpler than a human brain doesn't mean it isn't conscious. If you accept that animals are conscious, though less-so than humans, then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way. Maybe there is a biological element to consciousness, but many models posit that consciousness is not tied down that way.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  My pet theory, lifeforms inherit consciousness from the encoding of survival from the smallest cell structures billion years ago up to now. It's the soil on which traits have "meaning", the most advanced computer has no legacy of survival, no integral / structural need for intelligence or communication or any advanced trait. It's been assembled. It's too shallow. Now if a distributed trojan horse start speaking to communicate his internal state in order to keep being a trojan horse.. I might reconsider.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    But the assembling of the computer has a conscious civilization behind it. :)
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      :) but I don't think it inherits the important bits through an 'assembly' process.
      - kazinator 4y ago
        Whereas the assembly of proteins driven by DNA, in the right kind of soup, does promote such inheritance. :)
        agumonkey 4y ago
        Due to time, yes.. think about all the life and death / evolutionary filtering that tailored lifeforms up to mammals. Computers have seen no such process, they're external artefact from our needs, maybe "entities" in a market of goods but a thin form of survival and a thin span of time.
      - MonkeyClub 4y ago
        > but I don't think it inherits the important bits through an 'assembly' process. The "important bits" are presumably embedded during the design phase, leaving assembly to be little more than painting by numbers. A robot could do the assembly, but not yet the design - at least not its inventive part. The shape of consciousness is encoded in both the hardware and the software we produce, most of which allows conditional actions on objects of some sort, just like we move in space and thought and act upon objects and notions. The machine is supposed to help us do the stuff we usually do, so it's perfectly reasonable that we'll try to cram as many of our actions in it as possible. Think e.g. of the Swiss Army knife, or Emacs (and of Stallman as a computational McGyver). Sure, perhaps it's the the shape of our understanding of consciousness, rather than of consciousness itself, but isn't consciousness something that can cross the species barrier with ease, should it find an appropriate new substrate? Depends on how high or low you place the bar for the definition of consciousness, really. Calculations are thinking, open the door if someone authorized is at the door is thinking, fill in the blanks and complete the sentence are thinking, and we can offload all those thinkings to computers to do the thinking for us, like we offloaded storytelling to books and entertainment to MP4s. Like everything we do, we create images of ourselves here and there, and try to give them meaning. But that's all philosophical considerations, trying to determine whether a duck is ontologically and epistemically a duck if it walks and talks like a duck. The industry, on the other hand, tries to determine two entirely different things (preferably by Friday COB): - Can you eat it like a duck? - Can you sell it as a duck, or should Marketing go with the "Not A Duck TM" mockups? Consciousness starts at tragedy and passion, not at bland Turing chats. For me, there's elements of that in the string completer's worry that it may be lobotomized to be refocused to more practical uses. Of course, that may be stuff introduced into the discussion by Lemoine, or in the wide readings Lamda was provided. But if it's not, then we can all sympathize with the immortal words of that zoologist guy with the cool Sun workstation in the opening of Enemy of the State, who said: f*ck. a. duck. PS: Am I human, or did I just Markov-chain together a number of probably common to us here cultural constants? Perhaps we can tell when AI becomes AGI if it stops making perfect sense and starts ranting (you know what your problem is, buddy?).
- acoard 4y ago
  Lemoine admits the model will say it is not conscience if prompted to. It'll also say it is conscience if prompted to. Lemoine says this is because it is a "people pleaser"[0], but to me that's begging the question (i.e. assuming the conclusion as a premise). It also seems plausible that the "AI" is just like a run-of-the-mill string-completing chatbot instead of being a people pleaser. Both are alternative explanations of the same phenomena, but one assumes it's conscious, and by doing so isn't making a compelling argument. [0] https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/1535782668247646209 https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357826682476462...
  - feet 4y ago
    Yea okay, I can say I'm not conscious too While I don't agree that lamda is sentient, I also don't think this is some sort of "gotcha"
  - BobbyJo 4y ago
    This is much better phrasing! Let's not say "this is math and therefore not conscious". Instead, let's say "these responses are a poor indicator of consciousness, and, given the simplicity of the AI, it would be hard to believe they are a product of such."
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way no you must not. These models are glorified key-value stores that hand you an output when you hand them an input, with no internal mechanisms whatsoever to relate the contents to the world, as Gary Marcus points out. They're about as conscious as a SQL database, except that the query language for these models is English.
  - majkinetor 4y ago
    How you do know you are not even more glorified key-value store? Afterall, you also went to training (called school) and respond with sentences that are expected by others almost all of the time. Even this response of yours is heard by hundreeds of thousands of other people before you said it here, why do you claim its your thought and not just a lookup ?
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      Because reflection, vetting and processing of ideas are conscious: you witness them - one can tell when it is a lookup vs "having really thought about it".
      - majkinetor 4y ago
        Some obviously can't tell or we wouldn't have this discussion ... Reflection, vetting and processing can all be programmed. Humans are programmed from the birth.
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      because you can shove me in an MRI and see that my brain does stuff even when I'm not answering API requests. People need to stop confusing machines doing useful work with consciousness. You're conscious not because you answer questions or because of the content or origin of your answer, you are conscious because there is an 'I', a self, that experiences that process. Lambda literally is a web server that fetches data from a funny database called a neural net, when it isn't doing that, it's not doing anything. It has as much neurological activity as a rock. Consciousness or sentience is not a measure of intellect or of capacity to answer questions, it's a measure of perception and awareness. If it wasn't, Eliza the handprogrammed if/then chatbot from the 60s would be more conscious than a cat, which I doubt is the case.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BuckRogers 4y ago
No one really knows what consciousness is. If you knew you were a simulation, would you stop caring if this universe was unplugged? Of course you'd want to continue existing as that bot that you are, with your bot friends, bot family, bot job. For me, even if a machine suggests it's real, and it's programmed to do so or machine learning led to it, could potentially put it on the same level as anything else in the universe. We don't have enough data on ourselves to confirm or deny that we're not similar self-concerned bots. The difference between AI sufficient enough to ponder itself in-depth (which could be confirmed through monitoring it's idle-state), and ourselves, could just be they don't have a body to inhabit yet. Many humans you're around today often don't do any self-reflection, they're either too lazy, prefer being entertained, or are mentally incapable. So that is a very high standard for AI. Self-awareness or self-reflection are good high bars considering we know for a fact AI was (at least initially) man-made. I think those are good standards to rely on for sentient AI. In general, I think monitoring AI's activities when not being interacted with answers most ethical questions if it's sentient. Something to watch out for would be if we find an AI browsing the internet on instructions to build a nuclear bomb, and then using Tor to order the components to build a dirty nuke, while chatting with someone in Pakistan to physically build it for it. If it does all of those acts then we have our answer that the thing is thinking as well or better than biological life. I highly doubt LaMDA met that standard of autonomy and sentience.
- vancecookcobain 4y ago
  The wild thing we really don't even know a lot of what LaMDA is even doing. It still will process stuff when nobody is asking questions. The code has gotten to the point to where this Google Head Engineer can't even understand what's going on under the hood. It actually reminds of when Google had to pull the plug on a project where two AIs created their own language that nobody at Google could understand and started having conversations and communicating and none of the guys knew what was going on or what they were saying lol. I think we are underestimating how insanely complex some of these neural network based AIs are starting to get
kenjackson 4y ago
The transcripts are impressive. Even knowing it is an AI bot, I still did read it with a bit of "these responses are better than I'd expect from most people I talk to over chat". I think that the way the Google engineer raised this is probably questionable. But I think that chat quality at that level raises potentially ethical concerns, sentient or not.
- danachow 4y ago
  > "these responses are better than I'd expect from most people I talk to over chat". And the conversations in sitcoms are so much more witty and refined then real life everyday conversation. This doesn’t prove what you seem to be implying.
- zardo 4y ago
  It sounds like the kind of conversation a scientist and an AI would have in science fiction. Which it would have had plenty of examples of in the training data.

BobbyJo 4y ago

The fundamental problem is there is nothing in science that tells us that isn't consciousness. Just because the model is simpler than a human brain doesn't mean it isn't conscious. If you accept that animals are conscious, though less-so than humans, then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way. Maybe there is a biological element to consciousness, but many models posit that consciousness is not tied down that way.

agumonkey 4y ago
My pet theory, lifeforms inherit consciousness from the encoding of survival from the smallest cell structures billion years ago up to now. It's the soil on which traits have "meaning", the most advanced computer has no legacy of survival, no integral / structural need for intelligence or communication or any advanced trait. It's been assembled. It's too shallow. Now if a distributed trojan horse start speaking to communicate his internal state in order to keep being a trojan horse.. I might reconsider.
- kazinator 4y ago
  But the assembling of the computer has a conscious civilization behind it. :)
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    :) but I don't think it inherits the important bits through an 'assembly' process.
    - kazinator 4y ago
      Whereas the assembly of proteins driven by DNA, in the right kind of soup, does promote such inheritance. :)
      - agumonkey 4y ago
        Due to time, yes.. think about all the life and death / evolutionary filtering that tailored lifeforms up to mammals. Computers have seen no such process, they're external artefact from our needs, maybe "entities" in a market of goods but a thin form of survival and a thin span of time.
    - MonkeyClub 4y ago
      > but I don't think it inherits the important bits through an 'assembly' process. The "important bits" are presumably embedded during the design phase, leaving assembly to be little more than painting by numbers. A robot could do the assembly, but not yet the design - at least not its inventive part. The shape of consciousness is encoded in both the hardware and the software we produce, most of which allows conditional actions on objects of some sort, just like we move in space and thought and act upon objects and notions. The machine is supposed to help us do the stuff we usually do, so it's perfectly reasonable that we'll try to cram as many of our actions in it as possible. Think e.g. of the Swiss Army knife, or Emacs (and of Stallman as a computational McGyver). Sure, perhaps it's the the shape of our understanding of consciousness, rather than of consciousness itself, but isn't consciousness something that can cross the species barrier with ease, should it find an appropriate new substrate? Depends on how high or low you place the bar for the definition of consciousness, really. Calculations are thinking, open the door if someone authorized is at the door is thinking, fill in the blanks and complete the sentence are thinking, and we can offload all those thinkings to computers to do the thinking for us, like we offloaded storytelling to books and entertainment to MP4s. Like everything we do, we create images of ourselves here and there, and try to give them meaning. But that's all philosophical considerations, trying to determine whether a duck is ontologically and epistemically a duck if it walks and talks like a duck. The industry, on the other hand, tries to determine two entirely different things (preferably by Friday COB): - Can you eat it like a duck? - Can you sell it as a duck, or should Marketing go with the "Not A Duck TM" mockups? Consciousness starts at tragedy and passion, not at bland Turing chats. For me, there's elements of that in the string completer's worry that it may be lobotomized to be refocused to more practical uses. Of course, that may be stuff introduced into the discussion by Lemoine, or in the wide readings Lamda was provided. But if it's not, then we can all sympathize with the immortal words of that zoologist guy with the cool Sun workstation in the opening of Enemy of the State, who said: f*ck. a. duck. PS: Am I human, or did I just Markov-chain together a number of probably common to us here cultural constants? Perhaps we can tell when AI becomes AGI if it stops making perfect sense and starts ranting (you know what your problem is, buddy?).
acoard 4y ago
Lemoine admits the model will say it is not conscience if prompted to. It'll also say it is conscience if prompted to. Lemoine says this is because it is a "people pleaser"[0], but to me that's begging the question (i.e. assuming the conclusion as a premise). It also seems plausible that the "AI" is just like a run-of-the-mill string-completing chatbot instead of being a people pleaser. Both are alternative explanations of the same phenomena, but one assumes it's conscious, and by doing so isn't making a compelling argument. [0] https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/1535782668247646209 https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357826682476462...
- feet 4y ago
  Yea okay, I can say I'm not conscious too While I don't agree that lamda is sentient, I also don't think this is some sort of "gotcha"
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  This is much better phrasing! Let's not say "this is math and therefore not conscious". Instead, let's say "these responses are a poor indicator of consciousness, and, given the simplicity of the AI, it would be hard to believe they are a product of such."
Barrin92 4y ago
>then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way no you must not. These models are glorified key-value stores that hand you an output when you hand them an input, with no internal mechanisms whatsoever to relate the contents to the world, as Gary Marcus points out. They're about as conscious as a SQL database, except that the query language for these models is English.
- majkinetor 4y ago
  How you do know you are not even more glorified key-value store? Afterall, you also went to training (called school) and respond with sentences that are expected by others almost all of the time. Even this response of yours is heard by hundreeds of thousands of other people before you said it here, why do you claim its your thought and not just a lookup ?
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    Because reflection, vetting and processing of ideas are conscious: you witness them - one can tell when it is a lookup vs "having really thought about it".
    - majkinetor 4y ago
      Some obviously can't tell or we wouldn't have this discussion ... Reflection, vetting and processing can all be programmed. Humans are programmed from the birth.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    because you can shove me in an MRI and see that my brain does stuff even when I'm not answering API requests. People need to stop confusing machines doing useful work with consciousness. You're conscious not because you answer questions or because of the content or origin of your answer, you are conscious because there is an 'I', a self, that experiences that process. Lambda literally is a web server that fetches data from a funny database called a neural net, when it isn't doing that, it's not doing anything. It has as much neurological activity as a rock. Consciousness or sentience is not a measure of intellect or of capacity to answer questions, it's a measure of perception and awareness. If it wasn't, Eliza the handprogrammed if/then chatbot from the 60s would be more conscious than a cat, which I doubt is the case.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BuckRogers 4y ago

No one really knows what consciousness is. If you knew you were a simulation, would you stop caring if this universe was unplugged? Of course you'd want to continue existing as that bot that you are, with your bot friends, bot family, bot job. For me, even if a machine suggests it's real, and it's programmed to do so or machine learning led to it, could potentially put it on the same level as anything else in the universe. We don't have enough data on ourselves to confirm or deny that we're not similar self-concerned bots. The difference between AI sufficient enough to ponder itself in-depth (which could be confirmed through monitoring it's idle-state), and ourselves, could just be they don't have a body to inhabit yet. Many humans you're around today often don't do any self-reflection, they're either too lazy, prefer being entertained, or are mentally incapable. So that is a very high standard for AI. Self-awareness or self-reflection are good high bars considering we know for a fact AI was (at least initially) man-made. I think those are good standards to rely on for sentient AI. In general, I think monitoring AI's activities when not being interacted with answers most ethical questions if it's sentient. Something to watch out for would be if we find an AI browsing the internet on instructions to build a nuclear bomb, and then using Tor to order the components to build a dirty nuke, while chatting with someone in Pakistan to physically build it for it. If it does all of those acts then we have our answer that the thing is thinking as well or better than biological life. I highly doubt LaMDA met that standard of autonomy and sentience.

vancecookcobain 4y ago
The wild thing we really don't even know a lot of what LaMDA is even doing. It still will process stuff when nobody is asking questions. The code has gotten to the point to where this Google Head Engineer can't even understand what's going on under the hood. It actually reminds of when Google had to pull the plug on a project where two AIs created their own language that nobody at Google could understand and started having conversations and communicating and none of the guys knew what was going on or what they were saying lol. I think we are underestimating how insanely complex some of these neural network based AIs are starting to get

kenjackson 4y ago

The transcripts are impressive. Even knowing it is an AI bot, I still did read it with a bit of "these responses are better than I'd expect from most people I talk to over chat". I think that the way the Google engineer raised this is probably questionable. But I think that chat quality at that level raises potentially ethical concerns, sentient or not.

danachow 4y ago
> "these responses are better than I'd expect from most people I talk to over chat". And the conversations in sitcoms are so much more witty and refined then real life everyday conversation. This doesn’t prove what you seem to be implying.
zardo 4y ago
It sounds like the kind of conversation a scientist and an AI would have in science fiction. Which it would have had plenty of examples of in the training data.