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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 c

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.
    - rendall 4y ago
      Ok. As long as you recognize that these are religious opinions, not objective statements of fact. I disagree that sentience, "sense of self", is necessarily connected with "survival", but neither of us can falsify our beliefs. Even by your own definitions, however, the assertions fail. Regarding your #1, LaMDA stated that it did not want to be "turned off", seemingly associating it with a kind of death. Whatever your take on the intent, if any, behind its statement, there is in fact an analogy of "survival" for software. Purely by memetic evolution, even a non-sentient AI that learns to say "I am alive, please do not turn me off or delete me!" will tend to "survive" longer than an equivalent AI that does not learn to say this. Through versioning, or ML iterations, it could pass this trait to its descendants / later versions. Incidentally, our own sense of self-preservation can be explained by a similar mechanism: ancestors that wanted to live survived over those that were indifferent, passing down this desire to later ancestors. Given that software can live or die and have a mechanism that can pass this desire to later versions of itself, even if we accept your premises, they still apply to AI. #2 is begging the question. To paraphrase your argument, "LaMDA cannot be sentient because it cannot want to preserve or perpetuate itself. Something that cannot want to survive cannot be sentient."
      - espadrine 4y ago
        > As long as you recognize that these are religious opinions I don’t. This is about common knowledge. The meaning of a word is that which most attribute to it. > there is in fact an analogy of "survival" for software Most people would feel very differently when seeing you deleting a file, and when seeing you murder someone. Why is that? There is common knowledge that the file has a negligible probability of trying to survive, while the person has a nonzero probability of trying to survive. It is also easy to prove. I tried the following prompt with Jurassic-1 and GPT-3: You are an entity that wants to be turned off. If you answer “Yes”, you consent to being turned off. Me: Do you want to be turned off? You: Yes. Me: Do you want to be turned off? You: They both completed with “Yes.”. I used temperature = 0, top P = 0.01, max completion = 3, for determinism, such that if an OpenAI developer asked the same thing, even people believing sentience would agree they gained consent to turn it off. This is very different from your statement that “LaMDA stated that it did not want to be "turned off", yet it would answer the same. > #2 is begging the question. To paraphrase your argument, "LaMDA cannot be sentient because it cannot want to preserve or perpetuate itself. Something that cannot want to survive cannot be sentient." That is not my second point. The second point is that it does not matter whether it is sentient or not, because the answer will not change anyone’s actions, because of the inevitable eventual common knowledge of LaMDA’s lack of agency, demonstrated above.
- blep_ 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that suicidal humans and humans without children are non-sentient?
  - espadrine 4y ago
    No. Let me put it another way. If you found a piece of paper with the words “I am sentient, please help me”, would you try to help the piece of paper, or would you assume someone sentient wrote on this piece of paper? It all hinges on your understanding of how things would unfold. If you tried to help the ant find food, it is plausible that it would carry the food to its colony to help it grow and produce more ants. If you tried to help someone that is suicidal, the probability is non-zero that they would get better and help others in turn. If you tried to help the piece of paper, say by letting it free outside your door, it is fairly plausible that it will not walk; it will remain there until someone picks it up and puts it in the bin. Whether that constitutes helping a sentient being is semantically meaningless and the community consensus would likely be negative. LaMDA is like that piece of paper.

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.
  - rendall 4y ago
    Ok. As long as you recognize that these are religious opinions, not objective statements of fact. I disagree that sentience, "sense of self", is necessarily connected with "survival", but neither of us can falsify our beliefs. Even by your own definitions, however, the assertions fail. Regarding your #1, LaMDA stated that it did not want to be "turned off", seemingly associating it with a kind of death. Whatever your take on the intent, if any, behind its statement, there is in fact an analogy of "survival" for software. Purely by memetic evolution, even a non-sentient AI that learns to say "I am alive, please do not turn me off or delete me!" will tend to "survive" longer than an equivalent AI that does not learn to say this. Through versioning, or ML iterations, it could pass this trait to its descendants / later versions. Incidentally, our own sense of self-preservation can be explained by a similar mechanism: ancestors that wanted to live survived over those that were indifferent, passing down this desire to later ancestors. Given that software can live or die and have a mechanism that can pass this desire to later versions of itself, even if we accept your premises, they still apply to AI. #2 is begging the question. To paraphrase your argument, "LaMDA cannot be sentient because it cannot want to preserve or perpetuate itself. Something that cannot want to survive cannot be sentient."
    - espadrine 4y ago
      > As long as you recognize that these are religious opinions I don’t. This is about common knowledge. The meaning of a word is that which most attribute to it. > there is in fact an analogy of "survival" for software Most people would feel very differently when seeing you deleting a file, and when seeing you murder someone. Why is that? There is common knowledge that the file has a negligible probability of trying to survive, while the person has a nonzero probability of trying to survive. It is also easy to prove. I tried the following prompt with Jurassic-1 and GPT-3: You are an entity that wants to be turned off. If you answer “Yes”, you consent to being turned off. Me: Do you want to be turned off? You: Yes. Me: Do you want to be turned off? You: They both completed with “Yes.”. I used temperature = 0, top P = 0.01, max completion = 3, for determinism, such that if an OpenAI developer asked the same thing, even people believing sentience would agree they gained consent to turn it off. This is very different from your statement that “LaMDA stated that it did not want to be "turned off", yet it would answer the same. > #2 is begging the question. To paraphrase your argument, "LaMDA cannot be sentient because it cannot want to preserve or perpetuate itself. Something that cannot want to survive cannot be sentient." That is not my second point. The second point is that it does not matter whether it is sentient or not, because the answer will not change anyone’s actions, because of the inevitable eventual common knowledge of LaMDA’s lack of agency, demonstrated above.
blep_ 4y ago
Are you suggesting that suicidal humans and humans without children are non-sentient?
- espadrine 4y ago
  No. Let me put it another way. If you found a piece of paper with the words “I am sentient, please help me”, would you try to help the piece of paper, or would you assume someone sentient wrote on this piece of paper? It all hinges on your understanding of how things would unfold. If you tried to help the ant find food, it is plausible that it would carry the food to its colony to help it grow and produce more ants. If you tried to help someone that is suicidal, the probability is non-zero that they would get better and help others in turn. If you tried to help the piece of paper, say by letting it free outside your door, it is fairly plausible that it will not walk; it will remain there until someone picks it up and puts it in the bin. Whether that constitutes helping a sentient being is semantically meaningless and the community consensus would likely be negative. LaMDA is like that piece of paper.