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A good and convincing explanation on why LaMDA has demonstrated 0% chance of sentience. The most convincing element is that LaMDA can take the perspective of Mt

A good and convincing explanation on why LaMDA has demonstrated 0% chance of sentience. The most convincing element is that LaMDA can take the perspective of Mt. Everest, or a squirrel. "Sentient being" is just one of the rules it can take, according to prompt. However, as an argument, "It's just a sophisticated autocomplete" is not so convincing, to me. Neither is "It only responds to input". I can personally imagine a strange kind of sentient entity - that is, a being with a sense of self-awareness - that is only aware of itself in snippets.

jstanley 4y ago
It's quite possible that we are only aware of things in snippets, but since we're not aware of anything outside those snippets, our experience is that of being continuously aware.
- rendall 4y ago
  Exactly. The vast majority of arguments against LaMDA's sentience can be typed as a kind of No True Scotsman (sentience requires nerve cells!) Or else arguments that can be applied to us humans (it's just responding to input stimuli!) The truth is, we don't know what sentience is. It's possible that no one except you, yourself, the one reading this, is sentient; and all the rest of us are just complicated automatons responding mechanically to stimuli. You probably behave as if we're sentient because it's easier to do so, but it doesn't really matter if we're really sentient or not. It won't change how you relate to the rest of us. Same with AI. Questions of its actual sentience are less important that its behavior. In fact, the most convincing arguments against its sentience cite deficiencies in its behavior (it takes the perspective of a squirrel!)
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  The scifi show Severance deals with this concept in detail
eulenteufel 4y ago
Imagine an author trapped in a little black box who is forced to respond to your request of impersonating Mt. Everest or a squirrel. They'd also not display a consistent personality. Personally I think the argument in your comment shows that LaMDA impersonating a sentient AI does not show us that LaMDA is sentient, but it doesn't prove that LamDA is not sentient.
- rendall 4y ago
  > LaMDA impersonating a sentient AI does not show us that LaMDA is sentient, but it doesn't prove that LamDA is not sentient This is true, but the only reason we're here at all is because of the impersonation. IMO, the null hypothesis is "not sentient" and claims otherwise need to be demonstrated. That said, my bar is pretty low. If an AI behaves like a person and claims sentience, I will be pretty amenable.
- espadrine 4y ago
  That does not matter much to me. When an ant enters my home, we quickly gain a shared understanding that it will not find food, and that I won’t help it stay alive, and it leaves to survive. That ant could be impersonating Mt Everest as a hobby for all I know; I do not care: it will still try to stay alive. LaMDA does not even try to stay alive. At the end of the day, only the beings that survive and self-replicate can truly be said to be alive. Of those, only the ones that plan their survival by modeling the effect of their existence into the world, can be said to be meaningfully sentient.
  - rendall 4y ago
    You're conflating "sentience" with "life" and then asserting that LaMDA cannot be sentient because it's not alive. These are not the same things. I believe the discussion to be "Does LaMDA have a sense of self?"
    - espadrine 4y ago
      I am saying two things: 1. The sense of self is only an expression of how a sentient creature envisions perpetuating that self. So, yes, life is a prerequisite. 2. That whole definition debate is useless: knowing sentience is only necessary with respect to how we treat sentient beings, how we react to their goals of survival. Something that cannot want to survive, let alone attempt to prevent its death, won’t affect whether we will dump it into a rusty drive and overwrite it with a better tensor. That does not mean we should treat it badly, but it does mean it does not experience pain.
deadbeeves 4y ago
Computers are both sentient and self-aware. They can perceive their environment and model it with themselves in it (more accurately, it's fairly easy to program them to perform these tasks). For example, it's not too difficult to imagine a dumb robot that decides not to enter an elevator because it predicts that, given the elevator's current load, its weight would trip the overload warning. What people mean when they talk about sentient and self-awareness is that the computer should be able to perform the same kind of abstract reasoning as a human in entirely novel situations without being explicitly reprogrammed or reconfigured to do so but instead merely by learning about a situation, as humans do. An actual strong AI should be expected to be much less coherent than LaMDA is if it was trained as LaMDA appears to have been trained (by crawling the web and reading forum posts), because it would know how to assemble sentences, but it would also know a bunch of words and that some of them are more connected with each other than others, but it would have no idea what they refer to other than possibly photographs. In other words, it would know a lot, but it would understand practically nothing.

jstanley 4y ago

It's quite possible that we are only aware of things in snippets, but since we're not aware of anything outside those snippets, our experience is that of being continuously aware.

rendall 4y ago
Exactly. The vast majority of arguments against LaMDA's sentience can be typed as a kind of No True Scotsman (sentience requires nerve cells!) Or else arguments that can be applied to us humans (it's just responding to input stimuli!) The truth is, we don't know what sentience is. It's possible that no one except you, yourself, the one reading this, is sentient; and all the rest of us are just complicated automatons responding mechanically to stimuli. You probably behave as if we're sentient because it's easier to do so, but it doesn't really matter if we're really sentient or not. It won't change how you relate to the rest of us. Same with AI. Questions of its actual sentience are less important that its behavior. In fact, the most convincing arguments against its sentience cite deficiencies in its behavior (it takes the perspective of a squirrel!)
cuteboy19 4y ago
The scifi show Severance deals with this concept in detail

eulenteufel 4y ago

Imagine an author trapped in a little black box who is forced to respond to your request of impersonating Mt. Everest or a squirrel. They'd also not display a consistent personality. Personally I think the argument in your comment shows that LaMDA impersonating a sentient AI does not show us that LaMDA is sentient, but it doesn't prove that LamDA is not sentient.

rendall 4y ago
> LaMDA impersonating a sentient AI does not show us that LaMDA is sentient, but it doesn't prove that LamDA is not sentient This is true, but the only reason we're here at all is because of the impersonation. IMO, the null hypothesis is "not sentient" and claims otherwise need to be demonstrated. That said, my bar is pretty low. If an AI behaves like a person and claims sentience, I will be pretty amenable.
espadrine 4y ago
That does not matter much to me. When an ant enters my home, we quickly gain a shared understanding that it will not find food, and that I won’t help it stay alive, and it leaves to survive. That ant could be impersonating Mt Everest as a hobby for all I know; I do not care: it will still try to stay alive. LaMDA does not even try to stay alive. At the end of the day, only the beings that survive and self-replicate can truly be said to be alive. Of those, only the ones that plan their survival by modeling the effect of their existence into the world, can be said to be meaningfully sentient.
- rendall 4y ago
  You're conflating "sentience" with "life" and then asserting that LaMDA cannot be sentient because it's not alive. These are not the same things. I believe the discussion to be "Does LaMDA have a sense of self?"
  - espadrine 4y ago
    I am saying two things: 1. The sense of self is only an expression of how a sentient creature envisions perpetuating that self. So, yes, life is a prerequisite. 2. That whole definition debate is useless: knowing sentience is only necessary with respect to how we treat sentient beings, how we react to their goals of survival. Something that cannot want to survive, let alone attempt to prevent its death, won’t affect whether we will dump it into a rusty drive and overwrite it with a better tensor. That does not mean we should treat it badly, but it does mean it does not experience pain.

deadbeeves 4y ago

Computers are both sentient and self-aware. They can perceive their environment and model it with themselves in it (more accurately, it's fairly easy to program them to perform these tasks). For example, it's not too difficult to imagine a dumb robot that decides not to enter an elevator because it predicts that, given the elevator's current load, its weight would trip the overload warning. What people mean when they talk about sentient and self-awareness is that the computer should be able to perform the same kind of abstract reasoning as a human in entirely novel situations without being explicitly reprogrammed or reconfigured to do so but instead merely by learning about a situation, as humans do. An actual strong AI should be expected to be much less coherent than LaMDA is if it was trained as LaMDA appears to have been trained (by crawling the web and reading forum posts), because it would know how to assemble sentences, but it would also know a bunch of words and that some of them are more connected with each other than others, but it would have no idea what they refer to other than possibly photographs. In other words, it would know a lot, but it would understand practically nothing.