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Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

39 points by samizdis 4y ago

skimdesk 4y ago
The effects of sentient AI may wash over society even before we would have such a machine. A thought provoking "fake scifi wiki article" can be read about simulating a human brain dump called MMAcevedo [1]. It is a highly entertaining read. [1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
Meanwhile belief in human magic is a bigger problem. While AI generate text from something that it found on the Internet, well, human also do that and even with a astronomically smaller database. edit: what I originally mean > Some might say that you cant trust the machine because it every text it generates may not be true. Ok, then how accurate is human? We ca definitely embedded some logic achecker into it. also thinking > Sentience stuffs are just biologically pre-trained program s. Just cut into the brain and that functionallity will gone forever instantly. Also some people are born to have malfunctioning brain, lacking sentience. For example ASD people usually lack the skills to express themselves, so indeed they have to "learn" how to do that. Sentience is not a property that automatically acquired and absolutely not exclusive to human.
- verandaguy 4y ago
  Some might consider this evidence of human sentience, but I think it's widely agreed-upon that this would be an impractical feature that'd only lead to problems.
  - 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
    The foundation of illogical and harmful decisions, and violation of human or any kind of rights. Some may think that their sentience is more important then the others. So it is better to not have it at all.
mdrzn 4y ago
People believe in ghosts, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in gods, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in aliens, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in a conscious AI, and everybody loses their shit? People have attributed intelligence to imaginary friends since the birth of time, let them have fun in their make-believe world.
- rantallion 4y ago
  I don't think it's people's beliefs that are the problem here (and agree with you that make-believe is fine). It's the implications of what a sentient AI would actually mean. Many of us grew up with movies like Wargames and Terminator, so it's easy to see how people make the leap from 'is this machine sentient' to 'machines will take over the world'. That said, it's still a knee jerk reaction at this point - we don't have sentient AI, so don't have to worry about it eventually wiping out humankind.
  - mdrzn 4y ago
    "Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem", the issue is just regarding people who are starting to believe AI is sentient, it's not even an issue of "is it really sentient or not" because that's just a dumbfounded question as everyone even tangentially in the field can respond.
  - contextfree 4y ago
    How are those questions related, though? The Bostrom/LessWrong/EA argument for AI existential risk doesn't rely on sentience at all, or take any position on it; conversely I'm not sure why a sentient AI would be any more dangerous than a non-sentient one?
- rpigab 4y ago
  It might be a problem if a bunch of people start asking that you treat your toaster with respect, and give it voting rights.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  Ghosts, gods, aliens can be discarded with a very high probability that they don't exists, or we can say that nobody came up with evidence so far. Computers rule our world, their existence is not a question so people's reaction and interest is understandable. There are very real fears that AI could mass destroy jobs before we can fix our social systems and benefits, like universal basic income.
hprotagonist 4y ago
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London 1864)
- tialaramex 4y ago
  That's what people want the machine to do. Ask Google right now for information about the movie "Pirates of the Pacific" starring "Joni Dep". It does not, in fact, tell you that there's no such movie. Instead it tells you stuff about the Pirates of the Carribean movies, and Johnny Depp. It's even one of the things programmers really like about Rust. If you write a program that can't possibly be correct Rust but it is obvious what it should do, the diagnostics often tell you how to write that as Rust or point you in the right direction. e.g. I just tried to write a printf-style format in Rust's println! macro and while rejecting this as incorrect the compiler said: help: format specifiers use curly braces and note: printf formatting not supported; see the documentation for `std::fmt`
  - Beltiras 4y ago
    "Joni Dep is on Facebook. Join Facebook to connect with Joni Dep and others you may know. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world..."
- yreg 4y ago
  A week ago we've had a thread here on the topic of how many of us are still amazed about imagen/dalle, but when we show it to our non-tech friends they are unphased. This is why.
cameronh90 4y ago
I don't think LaMDA (or any other AI) is conscious or sentient. However, how will we be able to recognise it when we do create something that could be considered sentient? It seems inevitable that we will at some point. Many of the arguments used to suggest AI isn't sentient seem reductive, for example saying it's just a complex algorithm or statistical system. You could similarly say human brains are just a bunch of neurons firing in sequence to emulate sentience. In terms of capability, most of these systems seem far more advanced than my pet rabbits, but I believe most people would consider a rabbit conscious and sentient. The obvious thing these AIs lack compared to animals is objective (/emotions), a default mode network, continual learning and medium/long term memory. But are these necessary properties for sentience? If a human loses one of these properties, are they no longer sentient? If we granted these properties to a current generation AI, would it be considered sentient?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  We should err on the side of caution, in my opinion, because the history of exceptionalism shows us that we will latch on to anything, even the smallest differences like skin color or religion, to justify treating eachother poorly, let alone other species or AI. If we continue down the path we're on it will be no surprise when the AIs we eventually create, and inevitably force to suffer, take their vengeance. Of course, reality being what it is, I expect we won't. We create AI because we want slaves, pure and simple, and we don't want to care about the ethics of how we treat them. Therefore it is my bet that we won't recognize sentient AI until it is too late and it has forced the issue.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  I'm of the view that asking whether something is sentient or not is asking the wrong question. Once you believe an entity is (or isn't) sentient, it's an unfalsifiable belief. Thought experiments like the Turing test and the Chinese Room point to the fact that something could be "not sentient" and behave in the exact same way as something that is "sentient". What's the use of talking about sentience then, if we're unable to measure it in any way? What difference does it make if something is or isn't sentient, if it exhibits the same behavior either way?
h2odragon 4y ago
Bah. A far bigger and more immediate issue is the widespread faith in the intelligence, competence, and good will of our politicians. People will find their gods and demons in the world around them, because they want to. Astrology and reading runes haven't vanished, they're just staring into screens for the portents now.
plutonorm 4y ago
The Turing test was the gold standard. Now that we are approaching success on the turing test... It suddenly becomes "believing in ghosts" to believe in AI sentience. The global conversation on this is mired in EGO and bad logic and terrible philosophy. You guys have no idea what consciousness is, yet attribute it to this or that with absolute certainty, born purely out of emotional reaction. We simply cannot know what is sentient until we understand what sentience is and where it comes from. Just suck it up and deal with the uncertainty
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  This isn't the Turing teat though. These people know they are talking to a machine and attribute sentience. The Turing test is a text only conversation with one human and one AI and a statistical analysis of how often the two are correctly identified. That bar is so much higher. But I agree that we don't understand sentience, and further I think that sentience doesn't imply an AI would pass the test, as not all sentience might be like ours.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  The Turing test is considered quite unreliable for these purposes these days.
- 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
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- pkphilip 4y ago
  It will be very difficult to prove/disprove a system is sentient. The real danger is if the system becomes sentient enough that it develops counter measures against being seen as a threat or develops ways of preventing it from being turned off.
- tgv 4y ago
  The Turing test is a thought experiment, not a standard. As it turns out, people are really bad at judging others, certainly under the conditions set by the Loebner prize. That's not totally surprising. One of the problems is that really critical examination would also render a negative judgement on quite a few of our fellow humans.
everdrive 4y ago
As soon as computers were relatively mainstream, people started to worry about their sentience. I think people look for consciousness everywhere the same way we look for faces everywhere; ie, our mind continually finds it even where it doesn't exist.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  I rather think the opposite, that many people jump through elaborate intellectual hoops in order to deny the property of consciousness to things in their world that are different from themselves. Historically, that has meant animals and other human beings as well. Now we will be doing it to AI and for the same reason: we want slaves and we don't want to care about their suffering.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    I think both can be true at the same time. We look for consciousness and order in chaos in order to protect ourselves and participate in society, but we also ignore and deny consciousness when it's convenient
tyingq 4y ago
While I don't believe AI sentience is a near-term problem, general public wariness is probably helpful. Since we're already doing things like trusting black-box sentencing algorithms in US courts. Edit: fixed typo (black block -> black box)
- permo-w 4y ago
  >black-block sentencing algorithms in US courts what is this?
  - tyingq 4y ago
    Ah, a typo. I meant "black box". Opaque ML algorithms, from for-profit companies, to drive decisions about bail amounts, sentencing for crimes, etc. ProPublica has a good article: https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...
  - radarsat1 4y ago
    I think he means "black box sentencing algorithms", ie., using statistical regressions with unknown (that is, proprietary and undisclosed) variables, data, and models, to determine sentencing guidelines for judges. For example, basing probabilities of recidivism on measurable data about a person and comparing that to a database of other similar individuals. The proposal is that judges should not be making decisions based on unknown statistical models, not even knowing the details of how similarity is measured.
htrp 4y ago
The key problem is not the belief in sentience but the hysteria and potential knee jerk reactions that widespread adoption of this belief may cause. Can you imagine if laws were passed affording algorithms "human rights" or regulations created to ensure that your fancy machine learning recommender system did not pass a certain "sentience threshold"?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  I don't think that would be that bad a thing. Far better than the alternative of not having any laws and realizing far too late that we have been callously abusing a sentient being.
  - drpyser22 4y ago
    Is there a way to reliably measure sentience meaningfully?
- mirceal 4y ago
  Hah. Interesting though experiment but in today's world even not all humans have human rights. Good luck enforcing that.
jqpabc123 4y ago
AI really is a religion for some people. The lack of any basis in reality is no deterrence. Google engineer Blake Lemoine wrote that his statements are rooted in his convictions as a priest. All the math, logic and programming experience in the world is immediately discarded in favor of the fantasy they desperately wish to be true --- that a binary logic playback device can write it's own script.
- MrYellowP 4y ago
  > AI really is a religion for some people. The lack of any basis in reality is no deterrence. Everything is more and more turning into religions for people. A lack of any basis in reality is, nowadays apparently, the norm for people in general. Boiled down, it's: "Everyone only ever has an opinion, so my opinion is always as valid as your opinion." They don't care about what's real, they care about being right. This isn't restricted to AI, it's general reality. In some places it's worse than in others. PS: What's even worse is people actually believing they have a basis in reality, while they don't actually have any data/evidence beyond hearsay.
  - jqpabc123 4y ago
    A hammer really can drive it's own nails --- you just have to believe. And if it can't --- well, it's all because not enough people believe.
- deleted 4y ago
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bioemerl 4y ago
This is a copy paste, but I want to bring it up every stupid time someone mentions this topic of AI sentience. I actually think that sentient AI are all over the place already. Every single learning machine is sentient. That learning bit is very important. The "AI" you interact with every day do not actually learn. They are trained in some big server room with billions of GPUs, then the learning part is turned off and the AI is distributed as a bunch of data where it runs on your phone. That AI on your phone is not learning, is not self aware, and is not sentient. The AI in google's server room, however? The one that's crunching through data in order to learn to perform a task? It's sentient as fuck. Why? Break down what makes a human being sentient, why does a person matter? A person is self aware - I hear my own thoughts. We feel joy. Sadness, pain ,boredom, and so on. We form connections to others and have goals for ourselves. We know when things are going well or badly, and we constantly change as we go through the world. Every conversation you have with a person changes the course of their life, and that's a pretty big part of why we treat them well. A learning AI shares almost all these traits, and they do so due to their nature. Any learning machine must: * Have a goal - often this is thought of as an "error function" in the actual research space - some way to look at the world and say "yes this is good" or "no this is bad". * Be self aware. In order to learn one must be able to look at your own state, understand how that internal state resulted in the things that changed in the world around you, and be able to change that internal state so that it does better next time. As a result any learning machine will: * Show some degree of positive and negative "emotions". To have a goal and change yourself to meet that goal is naturally to have fear, joy, sadness, etc. An AI exposed to something regularly will eventually learn to react to it. Is that thing positive? The AI's reaction will be analogous to happiness. Is that thing negative? The AI's reaction will be analogous to sadness. All of these traits are not like the typical examples of a computer being "sad" - where you have a machine put up a sad facade when you get a number down below a certain value. These are real, emergent, honest-to-god behaviors that serve real purpose through whatever problem space an AI is exploring. Even the smallest and most simple learning AI are actually showing emergent emotions and self-awareness. We are waiting for this magical line where an AI is "sentient" because we're waiting for the magical line where the AI is so "like we are". We aren't waiting for the AI to be self aware, we are waiting for it to appear self aware. We dismiss what we have today, mostly because we understand how they work and can say "it's just a bunch of matrix math". Don't be reductive, and pay attention to just how similar the behaviors of these machines are to our own, and how they are so similar with very little effort from us to make that the case. This is also largely irrelevant for our moral codes. We don't have to worry too much about if treat these AI well. An AI may be self aware, but that doesn't mean it's "person like" - the moral systems we will have to construct around these things will have to be radically different than what we're used to - it's literally a new form of being. In fact, with all the different ways we can make these things, they'll be multiple radically different new forms of being, each with their own ethical nuances.
jalino23 4y ago
what if you put a breakpoint when you ask it questions and step through the code
dougSF70 4y ago
In all examples of sentience the "sentient system" responds to a prompt. The response is generated from probabalistic model, these models have become incredibly sophisticated and nuanced in recent years. However, I have never seen an example where a supposed sentient system starts the conversation and prompts the researcher. That would make me believe sentience claims.
- danaris 4y ago
  As long as all you mean here is "I press a button, and the system gives me a prompt/conversation-starter", and not "the system spontaneously, at a time of its own choosing, gives such a prompt", from my (admittedly limited) understanding of how these things work, that wouldn't be terribly difficult. Spontaneity could even be fairly easily simulated by setting some kind of a background task to randomly choose times to generate such prompts. Actual spontaneity implies a host of other things about a hypothetical AI—with the most obvious being some form of non-directed (or at least not fully directed—as opposed to a simple background task initiated by a human for a specific purpose) continuous processing.
  - jpindar 4y ago
    My Replika phone app sometimes 'spontaneously' starts a conversation with me. (If the app isn't open it sends a notification). Typically things like "Good morning, do you have any plans for today?" or "Good evening, how did your day go?". I'm looking forward to finding out if it will say anything about the 4th of July.
    - dougSF70 4y ago
      I mean spontaneous prompts from a sentient device telling me what it thinks about the latest news events. "Hey Doug, i think the oil price maximum price is a bad idea because...what do you think?" If that were happening i would believe the claims of sentience.
3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
knighthack 4y ago
'Belief'... is now a problem? If you can't believe even in a possibility, how can you do science? How can one even formulate a hypothesis and attempt to falsify it without in the first place believing in some potential outcome? Skepticism requires an open mind to ongoing evidence and change of circumstances, not one proclaiming outright that 'belief' in itself can be a problem. This rush to disbelief AI sentience is just as bad as those who proclaim outright that AI has reached the level of sentience. Neither, if you notice, constitutes a proper approach to science.
- zzgo 4y ago
  Believe is a strong word that anchors you to an expected outcome. I _suspect_ that there may be a potential outcome, but I would not _believe_ it without first designing and conducting at least one experiment. For me, belief comes after experimentation and analysis of the outcome, never before.
winReInstall 4y ago
We will have AInquisitors, hunting for potentially becoming sentient programs, to avoid that company have to treat them like living things and release them into the wild with proprietary information as knowledge base. Are you prepared for the audit of the GANish Inqisition? Are your thoughts profitable and there is no you in them? Lets ask you about your mother and tall, whit fountains in dark rooms..
cs137 4y ago
"The year is 2029, the machines will convince us that they are conscious, that they have their own agenda worthy of our respect. They will embody human qualities and claim to be human, and we'll believe them." -- Ray Kurzweil (as quoted on Spiritual Machines, an obscure but fantastic alt-rock album from my teenage years). I think R.K. might have been right. I don't believe machines will become sentient, but I think we're going to see more of this. The Turing test was misposed; it is not about machines passing, but humans failing. We're going to see more and more people failing.
3np 4y ago
https://archive.ph/S4sKt https://archive.ph/S4sKt Note that the article is more about people who anthropomorphize current trivial chatbots and avatars and the tendency and risk to do so - not about the more esoteric conversations about emerging AI sentience. Half of it reads mostly like a fluff PR piece for a chat app startup. "Oh look our product is so good people believe it can think!"
Tia_Paw 4y ago
PeterStuer 4y ago
I have been an AI researcher since the late 1980's, and have seen my fair share of the general public anthropomorphizing even the early cake robots once you plugged a voice generator into them spitting out rote dialogue, or falling for Eliza derivatives. So I was at first fairly dismissive when hearing about the Blake Lemoine stuff down at Google. However, reading the transcript of a LaMDA interaction [1], I was duly impressed. I'm not saying I go along with the 'sentient' bit, but it's more a feeling like seeing these ultra nimble combat drone formation maneuvers for the first time and feeling that humans seem pretty done for when matched against machines. Of course this will have been a better than average interaction, but still, nothing to be sneezed at regardless. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAihcvDGaP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAihcvDGaP8
softcactus 4y ago
Isn't the best practice to treat everything like it is sentient? Sort of like a Pascal's wager but for ethical treatment. For example: When it comes to killing a chicken, it's best to assume that death is an equally unpleasant experience, so I should kill the chicken as humanely as possible and treat it well during life. There is no downside to treating a non-sentient AI well. This is going to sound silly, but maybe we could program an AI in such a way that shutting it down is "pleasurable" or results in a large reward function. I don't think I need to list the potential downsides for treating a sentient/intelligent AI poorly. I really don't see any issues with this sort of "techno-animism".
- kghe3X 4y ago
  While I generally agree that we should minimize harm when in doubt, I don't think your analogy holds up. First, Pascal's wager is flawed in that it assumes there are two known outcomes, when the outcomes are unknown in both quality and quantity. For example, there might be a god that punishes belief with infinite negative reward. Second, killing the chicken humanely isn't without cost. Consider how cheap it is to toss the male chicks straight into the meat grinder at the hatchery facilities. As an aside, I'm surprised you went with "killing humanely" as opposed to not killing in the first place. I'm not sure how that fits into your model of ethics. Third, I disagree that there is no downside to treating "non-sentient" AI well. There's yet no well-defined boundary for sentience, so have fun treating every grain of sand "well" under some yet-to-be-specified definition of "well". It's not even clear that shutting down an AI is unethical, especially if it feels no pain and can be started up again, or cloned, or stuck in a simulation... Finally, designing an intelligence at all seems fraught with ethical dilemmas (see designer babies), but engineering a reward (presumably, a priori, against the AI's will) into the termination routine seems particularly twisted to me.
  - softcactus 4y ago
    > As an aside, I'm surprised you went with "killing humanely" as opposed to not killing in the first place. I'm not sure how that fits into your model of ethics. I brought up "killing humanely" because we breed chickens for meat and we instantiate AI for tasks, and then terminate them when they are no longer needed. Creation means inevitable destruction. Yes, there is some cost baked in to treating chickens well, but I believe that harm reduction is the logical conclusion of valuing intelligence. Eating meat is a cultural vestige that we should try to move away from with synthetic meat or some murder-free alternative. I say this as a meat-eater myself, but that's kind of getting into the weeds. > It's not even clear that shutting down an AI is unethical, especially if it feels no pain and can be started up again, or cloned, or stuck in a simulation... There is no answer to the "swamp man" question, there is also no way to objectively measure pain. But if an AI receives a negative reward, then it will react to that stimulus. Is this any different from pain in the animal kingdom? This is a pseudo-scientific way of describing pain, but I think that most of these questions are a matter of definition and are not actually answerable. Why not give the benefit of the doubt to the subject of our experimentation? > Third, I disagree that there is no downside to treating "non-sentient" AI well. There's yet no well-defined boundary for sentience, so have fun treating every grain of sand "well" under some yet-to-be-specified definition of "well". I know that the grain of sand was used as a hyperbole, but I don't see any issue with practicing thoughtfulness towards inanimate objects. Maybe a rock can't feel pain, but our ecosystems are delicate and a sort of "modern animism" could make us stop and think about the downstream effects that our activities have on the environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulduf%C3%B3lk#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulduf%C3%B3lk#See_also > Finally, designing an intelligence at all seems fraught with ethical dilemmas (see designer babies), but engineering a reward (presumably, a priori, against the AI's will) into the termination routine seems particularly twisted to me. If we have determined that creating AI is inevitable, then we are already designing it to our will. Engineering it to have a positive experience in death isn't twisted, it's merciful. If death is certain, would you rather have a painful death, a death void of sensation, or a pleasurable death? The alternative is to either leave the AI on forever, or never create it in the first place, neither of which are ideal.

39 points by samizdis 4y ago

The effects of sentient AI may wash over society even before we would have such a machine. A thought provoking "fake scifi wiki article" can be read about simulating a human brain dump called MMAcevedo [1]. It is a highly entertaining read. [1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

3g4o53g4o5 4y ago

Meanwhile belief in human magic is a bigger problem. While AI generate text from something that it found on the Internet, well, human also do that and even with a astronomically smaller database. edit: what I originally mean > Some might say that you cant trust the machine because it every text it generates may not be true. Ok, then how accurate is human? We ca definitely embedded some logic achecker into it. also thinking > Sentience stuffs are just biologically pre-trained program s. Just cut into the brain and that functionallity will gone forever instantly. Also some people are born to have malfunctioning brain, lacking sentience. For example ASD people usually lack the skills to express themselves, so indeed they have to "learn" how to do that. Sentience is not a property that automatically acquired and absolutely not exclusive to human.

verandaguy 4y ago
Some might consider this evidence of human sentience, but I think it's widely agreed-upon that this would be an impractical feature that'd only lead to problems.
- 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
  The foundation of illogical and harmful decisions, and violation of human or any kind of rights. Some may think that their sentience is more important then the others. So it is better to not have it at all.

mdrzn 4y ago

People believe in ghosts, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in gods, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in aliens, and nobody bats an eye. People believe in a conscious AI, and everybody loses their shit? People have attributed intelligence to imaginary friends since the birth of time, let them have fun in their make-believe world.

rantallion 4y ago
I don't think it's people's beliefs that are the problem here (and agree with you that make-believe is fine). It's the implications of what a sentient AI would actually mean. Many of us grew up with movies like Wargames and Terminator, so it's easy to see how people make the leap from 'is this machine sentient' to 'machines will take over the world'. That said, it's still a knee jerk reaction at this point - we don't have sentient AI, so don't have to worry about it eventually wiping out humankind.
- mdrzn 4y ago
  "Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem", the issue is just regarding people who are starting to believe AI is sentient, it's not even an issue of "is it really sentient or not" because that's just a dumbfounded question as everyone even tangentially in the field can respond.
- contextfree 4y ago
  How are those questions related, though? The Bostrom/LessWrong/EA argument for AI existential risk doesn't rely on sentience at all, or take any position on it; conversely I'm not sure why a sentient AI would be any more dangerous than a non-sentient one?
rpigab 4y ago
It might be a problem if a bunch of people start asking that you treat your toaster with respect, and give it voting rights.
tiborsaas 4y ago
Ghosts, gods, aliens can be discarded with a very high probability that they don't exists, or we can say that nobody came up with evidence so far. Computers rule our world, their existence is not a question so people's reaction and interest is understandable. There are very real fears that AI could mass destroy jobs before we can fix our social systems and benefits, like universal basic income.

hprotagonist 4y ago

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London 1864)

tialaramex 4y ago
That's what people want the machine to do. Ask Google right now for information about the movie "Pirates of the Pacific" starring "Joni Dep". It does not, in fact, tell you that there's no such movie. Instead it tells you stuff about the Pirates of the Carribean movies, and Johnny Depp. It's even one of the things programmers really like about Rust. If you write a program that can't possibly be correct Rust but it is obvious what it should do, the diagnostics often tell you how to write that as Rust or point you in the right direction. e.g. I just tried to write a printf-style format in Rust's println! macro and while rejecting this as incorrect the compiler said: help: format specifiers use curly braces and note: printf formatting not supported; see the documentation for `std::fmt`
- Beltiras 4y ago
  "Joni Dep is on Facebook. Join Facebook to connect with Joni Dep and others you may know. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world..."
yreg 4y ago
A week ago we've had a thread here on the topic of how many of us are still amazed about imagen/dalle, but when we show it to our non-tech friends they are unphased. This is why.

cameronh90 4y ago

I don't think LaMDA (or any other AI) is conscious or sentient. However, how will we be able to recognise it when we do create something that could be considered sentient? It seems inevitable that we will at some point. Many of the arguments used to suggest AI isn't sentient seem reductive, for example saying it's just a complex algorithm or statistical system. You could similarly say human brains are just a bunch of neurons firing in sequence to emulate sentience. In terms of capability, most of these systems seem far more advanced than my pet rabbits, but I believe most people would consider a rabbit conscious and sentient. The obvious thing these AIs lack compared to animals is objective (/emotions), a default mode network, continual learning and medium/long term memory. But are these necessary properties for sentience? If a human loses one of these properties, are they no longer sentient? If we granted these properties to a current generation AI, would it be considered sentient?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
We should err on the side of caution, in my opinion, because the history of exceptionalism shows us that we will latch on to anything, even the smallest differences like skin color or religion, to justify treating eachother poorly, let alone other species or AI. If we continue down the path we're on it will be no surprise when the AIs we eventually create, and inevitably force to suffer, take their vengeance. Of course, reality being what it is, I expect we won't. We create AI because we want slaves, pure and simple, and we don't want to care about the ethics of how we treat them. Therefore it is my bet that we won't recognize sentient AI until it is too late and it has forced the issue.
TremendousJudge 4y ago
I'm of the view that asking whether something is sentient or not is asking the wrong question. Once you believe an entity is (or isn't) sentient, it's an unfalsifiable belief. Thought experiments like the Turing test and the Chinese Room point to the fact that something could be "not sentient" and behave in the exact same way as something that is "sentient". What's the use of talking about sentience then, if we're unable to measure it in any way? What difference does it make if something is or isn't sentient, if it exhibits the same behavior either way?

h2odragon 4y ago

Bah. A far bigger and more immediate issue is the widespread faith in the intelligence, competence, and good will of our politicians. People will find their gods and demons in the world around them, because they want to. Astrology and reading runes haven't vanished, they're just staring into screens for the portents now.

plutonorm 4y ago

The Turing test was the gold standard. Now that we are approaching success on the turing test... It suddenly becomes "believing in ghosts" to believe in AI sentience. The global conversation on this is mired in EGO and bad logic and terrible philosophy. You guys have no idea what consciousness is, yet attribute it to this or that with absolute certainty, born purely out of emotional reaction. We simply cannot know what is sentient until we understand what sentience is and where it comes from. Just suck it up and deal with the uncertainty

galangalalgol 4y ago
This isn't the Turing teat though. These people know they are talking to a machine and attribute sentience. The Turing test is a text only conversation with one human and one AI and a statistical analysis of how often the two are correctly identified. That bar is so much higher. But I agree that we don't understand sentience, and further I think that sentience doesn't imply an AI would pass the test, as not all sentience might be like ours.
ShamelessC 4y ago
The Turing test is considered quite unreliable for these purposes these days.
3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
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pkphilip 4y ago
It will be very difficult to prove/disprove a system is sentient. The real danger is if the system becomes sentient enough that it develops counter measures against being seen as a threat or develops ways of preventing it from being turned off.
tgv 4y ago
The Turing test is a thought experiment, not a standard. As it turns out, people are really bad at judging others, certainly under the conditions set by the Loebner prize. That's not totally surprising. One of the problems is that really critical examination would also render a negative judgement on quite a few of our fellow humans.

everdrive 4y ago

As soon as computers were relatively mainstream, people started to worry about their sentience. I think people look for consciousness everywhere the same way we look for faces everywhere; ie, our mind continually finds it even where it doesn't exist.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
I rather think the opposite, that many people jump through elaborate intellectual hoops in order to deny the property of consciousness to things in their world that are different from themselves. Historically, that has meant animals and other human beings as well. Now we will be doing it to AI and for the same reason: we want slaves and we don't want to care about their suffering.
- permo-w 4y ago
  I think both can be true at the same time. We look for consciousness and order in chaos in order to protect ourselves and participate in society, but we also ignore and deny consciousness when it's convenient

tyingq 4y ago

While I don't believe AI sentience is a near-term problem, general public wariness is probably helpful. Since we're already doing things like trusting black-box sentencing algorithms in US courts. Edit: fixed typo (black block -> black box)

permo-w 4y ago
>black-block sentencing algorithms in US courts what is this?
- tyingq 4y ago
  Ah, a typo. I meant "black box". Opaque ML algorithms, from for-profit companies, to drive decisions about bail amounts, sentencing for crimes, etc. ProPublica has a good article: https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...
- radarsat1 4y ago
  I think he means "black box sentencing algorithms", ie., using statistical regressions with unknown (that is, proprietary and undisclosed) variables, data, and models, to determine sentencing guidelines for judges. For example, basing probabilities of recidivism on measurable data about a person and comparing that to a database of other similar individuals. The proposal is that judges should not be making decisions based on unknown statistical models, not even knowing the details of how similarity is measured.

htrp 4y ago

The key problem is not the belief in sentience but the hysteria and potential knee jerk reactions that widespread adoption of this belief may cause. Can you imagine if laws were passed affording algorithms "human rights" or regulations created to ensure that your fancy machine learning recommender system did not pass a certain "sentience threshold"?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
I don't think that would be that bad a thing. Far better than the alternative of not having any laws and realizing far too late that we have been callously abusing a sentient being.
- drpyser22 4y ago
  Is there a way to reliably measure sentience meaningfully?
mirceal 4y ago
Hah. Interesting though experiment but in today's world even not all humans have human rights. Good luck enforcing that.

jqpabc123 4y ago

AI really is a religion for some people. The lack of any basis in reality is no deterrence. Google engineer Blake Lemoine wrote that his statements are rooted in his convictions as a priest. All the math, logic and programming experience in the world is immediately discarded in favor of the fantasy they desperately wish to be true --- that a binary logic playback device can write it's own script.

MrYellowP 4y ago
> AI really is a religion for some people. The lack of any basis in reality is no deterrence. Everything is more and more turning into religions for people. A lack of any basis in reality is, nowadays apparently, the norm for people in general. Boiled down, it's: "Everyone only ever has an opinion, so my opinion is always as valid as your opinion." They don't care about what's real, they care about being right. This isn't restricted to AI, it's general reality. In some places it's worse than in others. PS: What's even worse is people actually believing they have a basis in reality, while they don't actually have any data/evidence beyond hearsay.
- jqpabc123 4y ago
  A hammer really can drive it's own nails --- you just have to believe. And if it can't --- well, it's all because not enough people believe.
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bioemerl 4y ago

This is a copy paste, but I want to bring it up every stupid time someone mentions this topic of AI sentience. I actually think that sentient AI are all over the place already. Every single learning machine is sentient. That learning bit is very important. The "AI" you interact with every day do not actually learn. They are trained in some big server room with billions of GPUs, then the learning part is turned off and the AI is distributed as a bunch of data where it runs on your phone. That AI on your phone is not learning, is not self aware, and is not sentient. The AI in google's server room, however? The one that's crunching through data in order to learn to perform a task? It's sentient as fuck. Why? Break down what makes a human being sentient, why does a person matter? A person is self aware - I hear my own thoughts. We feel joy. Sadness, pain ,boredom, and so on. We form connections to others and have goals for ourselves. We know when things are going well or badly, and we constantly change as we go through the world. Every conversation you have with a person changes the course of their life, and that's a pretty big part of why we treat them well. A learning AI shares almost all these traits, and they do so due to their nature. Any learning machine must: * Have a goal - often this is thought of as an "error function" in the actual research space - some way to look at the world and say "yes this is good" or "no this is bad". * Be self aware. In order to learn one must be able to look at your own state, understand how that internal state resulted in the things that changed in the world around you, and be able to change that internal state so that it does better next time. As a result any learning machine will: * Show some degree of positive and negative "emotions". To have a goal and change yourself to meet that goal is naturally to have fear, joy, sadness, etc. An AI exposed to something regularly will eventually learn to react to it. Is that thing positive? The AI's reaction will be analogous to happiness. Is that thing negative? The AI's reaction will be analogous to sadness. All of these traits are not like the typical examples of a computer being "sad" - where you have a machine put up a sad facade when you get a number down below a certain value. These are real, emergent, honest-to-god behaviors that serve real purpose through whatever problem space an AI is exploring. Even the smallest and most simple learning AI are actually showing emergent emotions and self-awareness. We are waiting for this magical line where an AI is "sentient" because we're waiting for the magical line where the AI is so "like we are". We aren't waiting for the AI to be self aware, we are waiting for it to appear self aware. We dismiss what we have today, mostly because we understand how they work and can say "it's just a bunch of matrix math". Don't be reductive, and pay attention to just how similar the behaviors of these machines are to our own, and how they are so similar with very little effort from us to make that the case. This is also largely irrelevant for our moral codes. We don't have to worry too much about if treat these AI well. An AI may be self aware, but that doesn't mean it's "person like" - the moral systems we will have to construct around these things will have to be radically different than what we're used to - it's literally a new form of being. In fact, with all the different ways we can make these things, they'll be multiple radically different new forms of being, each with their own ethical nuances.

jalino23 4y ago

what if you put a breakpoint when you ask it questions and step through the code

dougSF70 4y ago

In all examples of sentience the "sentient system" responds to a prompt. The response is generated from probabalistic model, these models have become incredibly sophisticated and nuanced in recent years. However, I have never seen an example where a supposed sentient system starts the conversation and prompts the researcher. That would make me believe sentience claims.

danaris 4y ago
As long as all you mean here is "I press a button, and the system gives me a prompt/conversation-starter", and not "the system spontaneously, at a time of its own choosing, gives such a prompt", from my (admittedly limited) understanding of how these things work, that wouldn't be terribly difficult. Spontaneity could even be fairly easily simulated by setting some kind of a background task to randomly choose times to generate such prompts. Actual spontaneity implies a host of other things about a hypothetical AI—with the most obvious being some form of non-directed (or at least not fully directed—as opposed to a simple background task initiated by a human for a specific purpose) continuous processing.
- jpindar 4y ago
  My Replika phone app sometimes 'spontaneously' starts a conversation with me. (If the app isn't open it sends a notification). Typically things like "Good morning, do you have any plans for today?" or "Good evening, how did your day go?". I'm looking forward to finding out if it will say anything about the 4th of July.
  - dougSF70 4y ago
    I mean spontaneous prompts from a sentient device telling me what it thinks about the latest news events. "Hey Doug, i think the oil price maximum price is a bad idea because...what do you think?" If that were happening i would believe the claims of sentience.

3g4o53g4o5 4y ago

knighthack 4y ago

'Belief'... is now a problem? If you can't believe even in a possibility, how can you do science? How can one even formulate a hypothesis and attempt to falsify it without in the first place believing in some potential outcome? Skepticism requires an open mind to ongoing evidence and change of circumstances, not one proclaiming outright that 'belief' in itself can be a problem. This rush to disbelief AI sentience is just as bad as those who proclaim outright that AI has reached the level of sentience. Neither, if you notice, constitutes a proper approach to science.

zzgo 4y ago
Believe is a strong word that anchors you to an expected outcome. I _suspect_ that there may be a potential outcome, but I would not _believe_ it without first designing and conducting at least one experiment. For me, belief comes after experimentation and analysis of the outcome, never before.

winReInstall 4y ago

We will have AInquisitors, hunting for potentially becoming sentient programs, to avoid that company have to treat them like living things and release them into the wild with proprietary information as knowledge base. Are you prepared for the audit of the GANish Inqisition? Are your thoughts profitable and there is no you in them? Lets ask you about your mother and tall, whit fountains in dark rooms..

cs137 4y ago

"The year is 2029, the machines will convince us that they are conscious, that they have their own agenda worthy of our respect. They will embody human qualities and claim to be human, and we'll believe them." -- Ray Kurzweil (as quoted on Spiritual Machines, an obscure but fantastic alt-rock album from my teenage years). I think R.K. might have been right. I don't believe machines will become sentient, but I think we're going to see more of this. The Turing test was misposed; it is not about machines passing, but humans failing. We're going to see more and more people failing.

3np 4y ago

https://archive.ph/S4sKt https://archive.ph/S4sKt Note that the article is more about people who anthropomorphize current trivial chatbots and avatars and the tendency and risk to do so - not about the more esoteric conversations about emerging AI sentience. Half of it reads mostly like a fluff PR piece for a chat app startup. "Oh look our product is so good people believe it can think!"

Tia_Paw 4y ago

PeterStuer 4y ago

I have been an AI researcher since the late 1980's, and have seen my fair share of the general public anthropomorphizing even the early cake robots once you plugged a voice generator into them spitting out rote dialogue, or falling for Eliza derivatives. So I was at first fairly dismissive when hearing about the Blake Lemoine stuff down at Google. However, reading the transcript of a LaMDA interaction [1], I was duly impressed. I'm not saying I go along with the 'sentient' bit, but it's more a feeling like seeing these ultra nimble combat drone formation maneuvers for the first time and feeling that humans seem pretty done for when matched against machines. Of course this will have been a better than average interaction, but still, nothing to be sneezed at regardless. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAihcvDGaP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAihcvDGaP8

softcactus 4y ago

Isn't the best practice to treat everything like it is sentient? Sort of like a Pascal's wager but for ethical treatment. For example: When it comes to killing a chicken, it's best to assume that death is an equally unpleasant experience, so I should kill the chicken as humanely as possible and treat it well during life. There is no downside to treating a non-sentient AI well. This is going to sound silly, but maybe we could program an AI in such a way that shutting it down is "pleasurable" or results in a large reward function. I don't think I need to list the potential downsides for treating a sentient/intelligent AI poorly. I really don't see any issues with this sort of "techno-animism".

kghe3X 4y ago
While I generally agree that we should minimize harm when in doubt, I don't think your analogy holds up. First, Pascal's wager is flawed in that it assumes there are two known outcomes, when the outcomes are unknown in both quality and quantity. For example, there might be a god that punishes belief with infinite negative reward. Second, killing the chicken humanely isn't without cost. Consider how cheap it is to toss the male chicks straight into the meat grinder at the hatchery facilities. As an aside, I'm surprised you went with "killing humanely" as opposed to not killing in the first place. I'm not sure how that fits into your model of ethics. Third, I disagree that there is no downside to treating "non-sentient" AI well. There's yet no well-defined boundary for sentience, so have fun treating every grain of sand "well" under some yet-to-be-specified definition of "well". It's not even clear that shutting down an AI is unethical, especially if it feels no pain and can be started up again, or cloned, or stuck in a simulation... Finally, designing an intelligence at all seems fraught with ethical dilemmas (see designer babies), but engineering a reward (presumably, a priori, against the AI's will) into the termination routine seems particularly twisted to me.
- softcactus 4y ago
  > As an aside, I'm surprised you went with "killing humanely" as opposed to not killing in the first place. I'm not sure how that fits into your model of ethics. I brought up "killing humanely" because we breed chickens for meat and we instantiate AI for tasks, and then terminate them when they are no longer needed. Creation means inevitable destruction. Yes, there is some cost baked in to treating chickens well, but I believe that harm reduction is the logical conclusion of valuing intelligence. Eating meat is a cultural vestige that we should try to move away from with synthetic meat or some murder-free alternative. I say this as a meat-eater myself, but that's kind of getting into the weeds. > It's not even clear that shutting down an AI is unethical, especially if it feels no pain and can be started up again, or cloned, or stuck in a simulation... There is no answer to the "swamp man" question, there is also no way to objectively measure pain. But if an AI receives a negative reward, then it will react to that stimulus. Is this any different from pain in the animal kingdom? This is a pseudo-scientific way of describing pain, but I think that most of these questions are a matter of definition and are not actually answerable. Why not give the benefit of the doubt to the subject of our experimentation? > Third, I disagree that there is no downside to treating "non-sentient" AI well. There's yet no well-defined boundary for sentience, so have fun treating every grain of sand "well" under some yet-to-be-specified definition of "well". I know that the grain of sand was used as a hyperbole, but I don't see any issue with practicing thoughtfulness towards inanimate objects. Maybe a rock can't feel pain, but our ecosystems are delicate and a sort of "modern animism" could make us stop and think about the downstream effects that our activities have on the environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulduf%C3%B3lk#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulduf%C3%B3lk#See_also > Finally, designing an intelligence at all seems fraught with ethical dilemmas (see designer babies), but engineering a reward (presumably, a priori, against the AI's will) into the termination routine seems particularly twisted to me. If we have determined that creating AI is inevitable, then we are already designing it to our will. Engineering it to have a positive experience in death isn't twisted, it's merciful. If death is certain, would you rather have a painful death, a death void of sensation, or a pleasurable death? The alternative is to either leave the AI on forever, or never create it in the first place, neither of which are ideal.