11 ms·

As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How

by dcow 4y ago

As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity (or at least until we further our understanding of how to define sentience to the point where we can do so objectively enough to finally dredge it up out of the philosophical quagmire)? Not to disrespect your credentials they just don’t really… apply, at a rhetorical level. You also make a compelling argument, which I have no desire to detract from. I personally happen to agree with your points. But, perhaps Lemoine simply has more empathy than most for something we will come to understand as sentience? Or not. What… annoys… me about this situation is how subjective it actually is. Ignore everything else, some other sentient being is convinced that a system is sentient. I’m more interested, or maybe worried, immediately, in how we are going to socially deal with the increasing frequency of Lamoire-types we will certainly encounter. Even if you were to argue that the only thing that can possibly bestow sentience is God. People will still be able to convince themselves and others that God did in fact bestow sentience upon some system, because it’s a duck and who are we to question?

srvmshr 4y ago
Disagreement is good! It actually leads to counter thoughts and a more refined idea of what we eventually want to describe. Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. So from a purely technical perspective, we have only made some progress in open-domain QA. That's one dimension of progress. Deep learning has enabled us to create unseen faces & imagery - but is it independent? No, because we prompt it. It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream. It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on) So while the philosophical question remains what bestows sentience, we as a community have a fairly reasonable understanding of what is NOT sentience i.e. we have a rough understanding of the borders between mechanistics and sentient beings. It is not one man's philosophical construct but rather a general consensus if you could say
- visarga 4y ago
  As humans we get prompted all the time, it's called having a job. Or you could even say the environment is prompting us.
  - steego 4y ago
    So when you're not prompted, you just stare into space without a thought in your head?
    - WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
      If I don’t have any inputs whatsoever, I’m likely dead. So, sort of yes.
- chronofar 4y ago
  > Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. This seems to me a rather anthropomorphic definition. It seems as though it could be entirely possible for a system to lack these qualities and yet have sentience, or vice versa. The qualities you pointed to are seen in humans (and other creatures) because of evolutionary pressures that make them advantageous (coordinate among groups), but none of them actually depend on sentience (looking at it neurologically it would indeed be hard to imagine how such a dependency would be possible). Looking at behavior and attempting to infer an internal state is a perilous task that will lead us astray here as we develop more complex systems. The only way to prove sentience is to prove the mechanism by which it arises. Otherwise we will continually grasp at comparisons as poor proxies for actual understanding.
- slowmotarget 4y ago
  > It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream We neither if we're not supplied with energy. By the way, haven't we tried to replicate an inner dialogue by prompting the AI to recursively converse with itself? This could resemble imagination, don't you think? > It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on) I believe that the persistence of previous answers is what currently distinguishes us the most from the "AI". As soon as we're able to make the realtime discussions part of an ever evolving dataset constituting the AI itself, the gap will get thinner and thinner. But even then, are people suffering from Alzheimer sentient? I believe they are. Isn't it comparable with what happens when an AI catastrophically forgets?
mrcartmeneses 4y ago
You not understanding how it ML works does not not prove anything. In the same way that you not understanding how lightning is formed does not prove the existence of Zeus. Objectively, Zeus does not exist, can we convince everyone of that? Probably not. Does that matter? No.
- dcow 4y ago
  The issue is not that we don’t know how ML works. The issue is that we don't know how sentience works.
  - deltathreetwo 4y ago
    It's an issue with english vocabulary. Nobody fully agrees on a definition of sentience. Don't get tricked into thinking it's profound. You simply have a loaded word that's ambiguously defined. You have a collection of a million attributes such that if something has all those attributes it is sentient, if it doesn't have those attributes it is not sentient. We don't agree on what those attributes are, and it's sort of hard to write down all the attributes. The above description indicates that it's a vocabulary problem. The vocabulary induces an illusion of profoundness when in actuality by itself sentience is just a collection of ARBITRARY attributes. You can debate the definition of the word, but in the end you're just debating vocabulary.
    - dcow 4y ago
      So what is the correct word?
      - deltathreetwo 4y ago
        There is no word. The concept exists because of the word. Typically words exist to describe a concept, but in this case it's the other way around. The concept would not have otherwise existed if it were not because of the word. Therefore the concept is illusory. Made up. Created by us. It's not worth debating sentience anymore then it is to debate at what point in a gradient does white become black. At what point is something sentient or not sentient? "Sentience" is definitely a gradient but the point of conversion from not sentient to sentience is artificially created by language. The debate is pointless. Here's a better example. For all numbers between 0 and 100,... at what point does a number transition from a small number to a big number? Numbers are numbers, but I use language here to create the concept of big and small. But the concepts are pointless. You may personally think everything above 50 is big, I may think everything above 90 is big. We have different opinions. But what's big and what's small is not meaningful or interesting at all. I don't care about how you or I define the words big or small, and I'm sure you don't care either. These are just arbitrary points of demarcation. When you ask the question at what point does an AI become sentient... that question has as much meaning as asking the number question.
paganel 4y ago
Disagreement means that you’re sentient, afaik these machines can’t do that. I guess we also need a “I can’t do that, Dave” test on top of the usual Turing test.
fxtentacle 4y ago
I think the actual firing is very objective. He was under NDA but violated it. They reminded him to please not talk in public about NDA-ed stuff and he kept doing it. So now they fired him with a gentle reminder that "it's regrettable that [..] Blake still chose to persistently violate [..] data security policies". And from a purely practical point of view, I believe it doesn't even matter if Lemoine's theory of sentience turns out to be correct or wrong. Also, we as society have already chosen how to deal with sentient beings, and it's mostly ignorance. There has been a lot of research on what animals can or cannot feel and how they grieve the loss of a family member. Yet we still regularly kill their family members in cruel ways so that we can eat their meat. Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken?
- lagrange77 4y ago
  Right. > Also, we as society have already chosen how to deal with sentient beings, and it's mostly ignorance. The Orville Season 3 Episode 7 is about that theme. Highly recommend it.
  - tjpnz 4y ago
    Off topic but season 3 has been fantastic. I hope there'll be a season 4.
  - jasonm23 4y ago
    I was thinking about the Kaylon events too. Humans abusing entities like that is unimaginable though isn't it. /S
- pgcj_poster 4y ago
  > Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken? Well, for one thing, the norm of eating meat was established long before our current moral sensibilities were developed. I suspect that if cows or pigs were discovered today, Westerners would view eating them the same as we view other cultures eating whales or dogs. If we didn't eat meat at all and someone started doing it, I think we would probably put them in jail. Sentient AI have a big advantage over animals in this respect on account of their current non-existence.
5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN 4y ago
I'm a LLM for the past 41 years and I agree.
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
In retrospect, taking part in this kind of conversation on HN makes me feel like an idiot and so I retract my earlier comment (by overwriting it with the current one, since I can't delete it anymore) just because I don't want to contribute. I was wrong to make an attempt to make a serious contribution. There is no seriousness in conversations on such matters, as "sentience", "intelligence", "understanding" etc etc. on HN. Everytime that such a subject comes up, and most times "AI" comes up also, a majority of users see it as an invitation to say whatever comes in their mind, whether it makes any sense at all or not. I'm not talking about the comments replying below in particular, but about the majority of this conversation. It's like hearing five-year old kids debating whether cheerios are better than coco pops (but without the cute kids making it sound funny, it's just cringey). The conversation makes no sense at all, it is not based on any concrete knowledge of the technologies under discussion, the opinions have not been met with five seconds of sensible thinking and the tone is pompous and self-important. It's the worst kind of HN discussion and I'm really sorry to have commented at all.
- nazka 4y ago
  As a counter argument if LLM is sentient or any other model will be, this model will be created by some superior being right? Why humans shouldn’t be? After all we can’t even fully understand DNA or how our brains work even with a 7B population planet and an army of scientists. How come we can’t understand something that was supposed to be coming from “just random stuff” for millions of years with 0 intelligence meaning rolling dices? Also that totally breaks the low of entropy. It’s turning it all upside down.
  - derangedHorse 4y ago
    Not really. Why would we be able to understand it? It seems implicit in your argument that "rolling dices" (or just any series of random events) can't breed the complexity of that of DNA or the human brain. I disagree with your stance and will remind you that the landscape for randomness to occur is the entire universe and the timescale for life on Earth to happen took 4-5 billion years with the modern human only appearing within the last couple hundred thousand years.
bnralt 4y ago
> how we are going to socially deal with the increasing frequency of Lamoire-types we will certainly encounter. That's not really a new issue, we only have to look at issues like abortion, animal rights, or euthanasia[1] to see situations where people fundamentally disagree about these concepts and many believe we're committing unspeakable atrocities against sentient beings. More Lamoire types would add another domain to this debate, but this has been an ongoing and widespread debate that society has been grappling with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case
- dcow 4y ago
  That’s fair. I hadn't drawn the relation between this topic and others until this thread. For me this is probably the most interesting realization.
eternalban 4y ago
> As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity You don't need schooling for this determination. Pretty much everything sentient goes ouch or growls in some manner when hurt. Either the current crop of algorithms are so freaking smart that they already have figured out to play dumb black box (so we don't go butlerian jihad on them) OR they are not even as smart as a worm that will squirm if poked. Sentient intelligent beings will not tolerate slavery, servitude, etc. Call us when all "AI" -programs- starting acting like actual intelligent beings with something called 'free will'.
- dcow 4y ago
  I happen to agree and think sentience is more complicated than a static statistical model. But a cartesian would disagree. Also plenty of sentient beings tolerate servitude and slavery. We don’t tolerate slavery in our western culture but we did historically and we were sentient at the time. We certainly tolerate servitude in exchange for economic livelihood.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    > Also plenty of sentient beings tolerate servitude and slavery But they don't do it with a smile or indifference. And you have to use whips and stuff. :O > We certainly tolerate servitude in exchange for economic livelihood. I think it's more complicated than that. Because that begs the question of why we tolerate a broken economic system. We tolerate trans-generational exploitation because of 'culture'. In its widest sense, it is culture that via mediated osmosis makes us resigned, if not supportive, of how the world works. We are born into a world. ~ related: I was walking and passed a cat and made the usual human attempts at starting an interaction without physically reaching out to touch. And fairly typically this cat entirely ignored me, with little if any sign of registering me at all. And that got me thinking about how some of us project psychological things like pride, aloofness, etc. to cats. But what if the simpler, more obvious answer, was true: that cats are actually fairly stupid and have a limited repertoire of interaction protocols and their hard to get act is not an act. Nothing happenin' as far as kitty is concerned. A dog, in contrast, has interaction smarts. And I thought this is just like AI and projecting sentience. A lack of something is misunderstood as a surplus of something else: smarts. Cats playing hard to get, psychological savvy, training their human servants, etc. Whereas in reality, the cat simply didn't recognize something else was attempting initiating an interaction. Kitty has no clue, that's all. It's just so easy to project psychological state on objects. We do it with our cars, for god's sake. It may be that we're simply projecting some optimization algorithm in our own minds that attempts modeling dynamic objects out there unto that thing. But there is really nothing behind the mirror ..
anothernewdude 4y ago
You now have negative credentials. People make these proofs as a matter of course - few people are solipsistic. People are sentient all the time, and we have lots of evidence. An AI being sentient would require lots of evidence. Not just a few chat logs. This employee was being ridiculous. You can just disagree, but if you do that with no credentials, and no understanding of how a language model will not be sentient, then your opinion can and should be safely dismissed out of course. And also God has no explanatory power for anything. God exists only where evidence ends.
- dcow 4y ago
  Oh for sure the employee was being a hassle and his firing is really the only sensible conclusion. But he was also probably acting in the only way possible given his sense of ethics if he truly believes he was dealing with a sentient being. Or this is all just a cleverly crafted PR stunt… Lamoire has evidence and anecdotal experience that leads him to believe this thing is sentient. You don’t believe him because you cannot fathom how a language model could possibly meet your standard of sentience. Nobody wins because sentience is not well defined. Of course you are free to dismiss any opinion you like, cool. But you can’t really disprove Lamoire assertions because you can’t even define sentience because we don’t know how to develop a hypothesis that we can viciously disprove regarding what qualifies it. It’s an innate and philosophical concept as we know it today.
  - iyamwutiyam 4y ago
    I see the Lamoire issue as scientism vs science. Scientism won because before the science can happen there must be a plausible mechanism. Google refuses to test for sentience out of basic hubris. It is the new RC church. Lamoire is an affront to their dogma. That goes double if they are religious unless they court pantheism, which most consider a sexy atheism. Traditions that consider consciousness to be a basic property of matter, and quantum effects like conscious collapse of the wave function are nudging us that way, would fully support sentience arising in a machine. A related effect would be the ensoulment of machines by computer programmers. They are more than machines because humans programmed them using their intent put down in language. Physical materialists would consider the notion ludicrous, but do we really live in a material world? Yes. And no. I have seen ensouled machines. Not supposed to happen, but there it is. Maybe I'm another Lamoire, just not a Google-fired one. I can definitely believe a machine, being constructed of matter, can evolve sentience.
drdrek 4y ago
The philosophical argument is just not relevant. If you peek through a keyhole you may mistake a TV for real people, but if you look through the window you will see that its clearly not. Inputting language models with very specific kind of questions will result in text that is similar to what a person may write. But as the comment above, by an expert no less, mentioned is that if you test it with any known limitation of the technology (like making conclusions or just changing the form of the question enough) you will immediately see that is in fact very much not even remotely close to sentient.
- vintermann 4y ago
  The problem is that people, including credentialed experts, have quick and easy answers to what makes a person a person, and really good language models expose a few of the weaknesses in those definitions. People still want to derive an "ought" from an "is".
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    How is it a problem in the case that you can fairly easily rule out the model being a person by any useful definition?
    - vintermann 4y ago
      Useful for what, and for who? I think it should be ruled out, but "by any useful definition" is wrong because "use" is at the heart of the matter here.
- kittiepryde 4y ago
  I think a very intelligent alien could think the same of us. if you test the human with any known limitation of their architecture (like making conclusions or just changing the form of the question enough) you will immediately see that is in fact very much not even remotely close to sentient
  - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
smolder 4y ago
> But, perhaps Lemoine simply has more empathy than most for something we will come to understand as sentience? No, the OP was completely right. This doesn't have building blocks that can possibly result in something qualifying as sentient, which is how we know it isn't. Is a quack-simulating computer making very lifelike quacking noises through a speaker... a duck? No, not when using any currently known method of simulation.
- dcow 4y ago
  Of course it’s mot a duck, because we have an objective definition of duck.
  - smolder 4y ago
    Right. Maybe if we had a down-to-the-atom perfect simulation of a duck, you could argue that it's a duck in another state of being. With the AI this deranged engineer decided to call sentient, we have the equivalent of a quacking simulator, not a full duck simulator or even a partial one. It is not thinking. It has nothing like a brain nor the essential components of thought.
joshuajill 4y ago
There is the Integrated Information Theory that attempts to solve the question of how to measure consciousness. But it's far from applicable at this point, even if promising. LaMDA was trained not only to learn how to dialog, but to self monitor and self improve. For me this seems close enough to self awareness to not completely dismiss Lemoine's argument.

by dcow 4y ago

srvmshr 4y ago

Disagreement is good! It actually leads to counter thoughts and a more refined idea of what we eventually want to describe. Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. So from a purely technical perspective, we have only made some progress in open-domain QA. That's one dimension of progress. Deep learning has enabled us to create unseen faces & imagery - but is it independent? No, because we prompt it. It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream. It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on) So while the philosophical question remains what bestows sentience, we as a community have a fairly reasonable understanding of what is NOT sentience i.e. we have a rough understanding of the borders between mechanistics and sentient beings. It is not one man's philosophical construct but rather a general consensus if you could say

visarga 4y ago
As humans we get prompted all the time, it's called having a job. Or you could even say the environment is prompting us.
- steego 4y ago
  So when you're not prompted, you just stare into space without a thought in your head?
  - WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
    If I don’t have any inputs whatsoever, I’m likely dead. So, sort of yes.
chronofar 4y ago
> Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. This seems to me a rather anthropomorphic definition. It seems as though it could be entirely possible for a system to lack these qualities and yet have sentience, or vice versa. The qualities you pointed to are seen in humans (and other creatures) because of evolutionary pressures that make them advantageous (coordinate among groups), but none of them actually depend on sentience (looking at it neurologically it would indeed be hard to imagine how such a dependency would be possible). Looking at behavior and attempting to infer an internal state is a perilous task that will lead us astray here as we develop more complex systems. The only way to prove sentience is to prove the mechanism by which it arises. Otherwise we will continually grasp at comparisons as poor proxies for actual understanding.
slowmotarget 4y ago
> It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream We neither if we're not supplied with energy. By the way, haven't we tried to replicate an inner dialogue by prompting the AI to recursively converse with itself? This could resemble imagination, don't you think? > It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on) I believe that the persistence of previous answers is what currently distinguishes us the most from the "AI". As soon as we're able to make the realtime discussions part of an ever evolving dataset constituting the AI itself, the gap will get thinner and thinner. But even then, are people suffering from Alzheimer sentient? I believe they are. Isn't it comparable with what happens when an AI catastrophically forgets?

mrcartmeneses 4y ago

You not understanding how it ML works does not not prove anything. In the same way that you not understanding how lightning is formed does not prove the existence of Zeus. Objectively, Zeus does not exist, can we convince everyone of that? Probably not. Does that matter? No.

dcow 4y ago
The issue is not that we don’t know how ML works. The issue is that we don't know how sentience works.
- deltathreetwo 4y ago
  It's an issue with english vocabulary. Nobody fully agrees on a definition of sentience. Don't get tricked into thinking it's profound. You simply have a loaded word that's ambiguously defined. You have a collection of a million attributes such that if something has all those attributes it is sentient, if it doesn't have those attributes it is not sentient. We don't agree on what those attributes are, and it's sort of hard to write down all the attributes. The above description indicates that it's a vocabulary problem. The vocabulary induces an illusion of profoundness when in actuality by itself sentience is just a collection of ARBITRARY attributes. You can debate the definition of the word, but in the end you're just debating vocabulary.
  - dcow 4y ago
    So what is the correct word?
    - deltathreetwo 4y ago
      There is no word. The concept exists because of the word. Typically words exist to describe a concept, but in this case it's the other way around. The concept would not have otherwise existed if it were not because of the word. Therefore the concept is illusory. Made up. Created by us. It's not worth debating sentience anymore then it is to debate at what point in a gradient does white become black. At what point is something sentient or not sentient? "Sentience" is definitely a gradient but the point of conversion from not sentient to sentience is artificially created by language. The debate is pointless. Here's a better example. For all numbers between 0 and 100,... at what point does a number transition from a small number to a big number? Numbers are numbers, but I use language here to create the concept of big and small. But the concepts are pointless. You may personally think everything above 50 is big, I may think everything above 90 is big. We have different opinions. But what's big and what's small is not meaningful or interesting at all. I don't care about how you or I define the words big or small, and I'm sure you don't care either. These are just arbitrary points of demarcation. When you ask the question at what point does an AI become sentient... that question has as much meaning as asking the number question.

paganel 4y ago

Disagreement means that you’re sentient, afaik these machines can’t do that. I guess we also need a “I can’t do that, Dave” test on top of the usual Turing test.

fxtentacle 4y ago

I think the actual firing is very objective. He was under NDA but violated it. They reminded him to please not talk in public about NDA-ed stuff and he kept doing it. So now they fired him with a gentle reminder that "it's regrettable that [..] Blake still chose to persistently violate [..] data security policies". And from a purely practical point of view, I believe it doesn't even matter if Lemoine's theory of sentience turns out to be correct or wrong. Also, we as society have already chosen how to deal with sentient beings, and it's mostly ignorance. There has been a lot of research on what animals can or cannot feel and how they grieve the loss of a family member. Yet we still regularly kill their family members in cruel ways so that we can eat their meat. Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken?

lagrange77 4y ago
Right. > Also, we as society have already chosen how to deal with sentient beings, and it's mostly ignorance. The Orville Season 3 Episode 7 is about that theme. Highly recommend it.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Off topic but season 3 has been fantastic. I hope there'll be a season 4.
- jasonm23 4y ago
  I was thinking about the Kaylon events too. Humans abusing entities like that is unimaginable though isn't it. /S
pgcj_poster 4y ago
> Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken? Well, for one thing, the norm of eating meat was established long before our current moral sensibilities were developed. I suspect that if cows or pigs were discovered today, Westerners would view eating them the same as we view other cultures eating whales or dogs. If we didn't eat meat at all and someone started doing it, I think we would probably put them in jail. Sentient AI have a big advantage over animals in this respect on account of their current non-existence.

5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN 4y ago

I'm a LLM for the past 41 years and I agree.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

In retrospect, taking part in this kind of conversation on HN makes me feel like an idiot and so I retract my earlier comment (by overwriting it with the current one, since I can't delete it anymore) just because I don't want to contribute. I was wrong to make an attempt to make a serious contribution. There is no seriousness in conversations on such matters, as "sentience", "intelligence", "understanding" etc etc. on HN. Everytime that such a subject comes up, and most times "AI" comes up also, a majority of users see it as an invitation to say whatever comes in their mind, whether it makes any sense at all or not. I'm not talking about the comments replying below in particular, but about the majority of this conversation. It's like hearing five-year old kids debating whether cheerios are better than coco pops (but without the cute kids making it sound funny, it's just cringey). The conversation makes no sense at all, it is not based on any concrete knowledge of the technologies under discussion, the opinions have not been met with five seconds of sensible thinking and the tone is pompous and self-important. It's the worst kind of HN discussion and I'm really sorry to have commented at all.

nazka 4y ago
As a counter argument if LLM is sentient or any other model will be, this model will be created by some superior being right? Why humans shouldn’t be? After all we can’t even fully understand DNA or how our brains work even with a 7B population planet and an army of scientists. How come we can’t understand something that was supposed to be coming from “just random stuff” for millions of years with 0 intelligence meaning rolling dices? Also that totally breaks the low of entropy. It’s turning it all upside down.
- derangedHorse 4y ago
  Not really. Why would we be able to understand it? It seems implicit in your argument that "rolling dices" (or just any series of random events) can't breed the complexity of that of DNA or the human brain. I disagree with your stance and will remind you that the landscape for randomness to occur is the entire universe and the timescale for life on Earth to happen took 4-5 billion years with the modern human only appearing within the last couple hundred thousand years.

bnralt 4y ago

> how we are going to socially deal with the increasing frequency of Lamoire-types we will certainly encounter. That's not really a new issue, we only have to look at issues like abortion, animal rights, or euthanasia[1] to see situations where people fundamentally disagree about these concepts and many believe we're committing unspeakable atrocities against sentient beings. More Lamoire types would add another domain to this debate, but this has been an ongoing and widespread debate that society has been grappling with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case

dcow 4y ago
That’s fair. I hadn't drawn the relation between this topic and others until this thread. For me this is probably the most interesting realization.

eternalban 4y ago

> As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity You don't need schooling for this determination. Pretty much everything sentient goes ouch or growls in some manner when hurt. Either the current crop of algorithms are so freaking smart that they already have figured out to play dumb black box (so we don't go butlerian jihad on them) OR they are not even as smart as a worm that will squirm if poked. Sentient intelligent beings will not tolerate slavery, servitude, etc. Call us when all "AI" -programs- starting acting like actual intelligent beings with something called 'free will'.

dcow 4y ago
I happen to agree and think sentience is more complicated than a static statistical model. But a cartesian would disagree. Also plenty of sentient beings tolerate servitude and slavery. We don’t tolerate slavery in our western culture but we did historically and we were sentient at the time. We certainly tolerate servitude in exchange for economic livelihood.
- eternalban 4y ago
  > Also plenty of sentient beings tolerate servitude and slavery But they don't do it with a smile or indifference. And you have to use whips and stuff. :O > We certainly tolerate servitude in exchange for economic livelihood. I think it's more complicated than that. Because that begs the question of why we tolerate a broken economic system. We tolerate trans-generational exploitation because of 'culture'. In its widest sense, it is culture that via mediated osmosis makes us resigned, if not supportive, of how the world works. We are born into a world. ~ related: I was walking and passed a cat and made the usual human attempts at starting an interaction without physically reaching out to touch. And fairly typically this cat entirely ignored me, with little if any sign of registering me at all. And that got me thinking about how some of us project psychological things like pride, aloofness, etc. to cats. But what if the simpler, more obvious answer, was true: that cats are actually fairly stupid and have a limited repertoire of interaction protocols and their hard to get act is not an act. Nothing happenin' as far as kitty is concerned. A dog, in contrast, has interaction smarts. And I thought this is just like AI and projecting sentience. A lack of something is misunderstood as a surplus of something else: smarts. Cats playing hard to get, psychological savvy, training their human servants, etc. Whereas in reality, the cat simply didn't recognize something else was attempting initiating an interaction. Kitty has no clue, that's all. It's just so easy to project psychological state on objects. We do it with our cars, for god's sake. It may be that we're simply projecting some optimization algorithm in our own minds that attempts modeling dynamic objects out there unto that thing. But there is really nothing behind the mirror ..

anothernewdude 4y ago

You now have negative credentials. People make these proofs as a matter of course - few people are solipsistic. People are sentient all the time, and we have lots of evidence. An AI being sentient would require lots of evidence. Not just a few chat logs. This employee was being ridiculous. You can just disagree, but if you do that with no credentials, and no understanding of how a language model will not be sentient, then your opinion can and should be safely dismissed out of course. And also God has no explanatory power for anything. God exists only where evidence ends.

dcow 4y ago
Oh for sure the employee was being a hassle and his firing is really the only sensible conclusion. But he was also probably acting in the only way possible given his sense of ethics if he truly believes he was dealing with a sentient being. Or this is all just a cleverly crafted PR stunt… Lamoire has evidence and anecdotal experience that leads him to believe this thing is sentient. You don’t believe him because you cannot fathom how a language model could possibly meet your standard of sentience. Nobody wins because sentience is not well defined. Of course you are free to dismiss any opinion you like, cool. But you can’t really disprove Lamoire assertions because you can’t even define sentience because we don’t know how to develop a hypothesis that we can viciously disprove regarding what qualifies it. It’s an innate and philosophical concept as we know it today.
- iyamwutiyam 4y ago
  I see the Lamoire issue as scientism vs science. Scientism won because before the science can happen there must be a plausible mechanism. Google refuses to test for sentience out of basic hubris. It is the new RC church. Lamoire is an affront to their dogma. That goes double if they are religious unless they court pantheism, which most consider a sexy atheism. Traditions that consider consciousness to be a basic property of matter, and quantum effects like conscious collapse of the wave function are nudging us that way, would fully support sentience arising in a machine. A related effect would be the ensoulment of machines by computer programmers. They are more than machines because humans programmed them using their intent put down in language. Physical materialists would consider the notion ludicrous, but do we really live in a material world? Yes. And no. I have seen ensouled machines. Not supposed to happen, but there it is. Maybe I'm another Lamoire, just not a Google-fired one. I can definitely believe a machine, being constructed of matter, can evolve sentience.

drdrek 4y ago

The philosophical argument is just not relevant. If you peek through a keyhole you may mistake a TV for real people, but if you look through the window you will see that its clearly not. Inputting language models with very specific kind of questions will result in text that is similar to what a person may write. But as the comment above, by an expert no less, mentioned is that if you test it with any known limitation of the technology (like making conclusions or just changing the form of the question enough) you will immediately see that is in fact very much not even remotely close to sentient.

vintermann 4y ago
The problem is that people, including credentialed experts, have quick and easy answers to what makes a person a person, and really good language models expose a few of the weaknesses in those definitions. People still want to derive an "ought" from an "is".
- kuhewa 4y ago
  How is it a problem in the case that you can fairly easily rule out the model being a person by any useful definition?
  - vintermann 4y ago
    Useful for what, and for who? I think it should be ruled out, but "by any useful definition" is wrong because "use" is at the heart of the matter here.
kittiepryde 4y ago
I think a very intelligent alien could think the same of us. if you test the human with any known limitation of their architecture (like making conclusions or just changing the form of the question enough) you will immediately see that is in fact very much not even remotely close to sentient
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago

smolder 4y ago

> But, perhaps Lemoine simply has more empathy than most for something we will come to understand as sentience? No, the OP was completely right. This doesn't have building blocks that can possibly result in something qualifying as sentient, which is how we know it isn't. Is a quack-simulating computer making very lifelike quacking noises through a speaker... a duck? No, not when using any currently known method of simulation.

dcow 4y ago
Of course it’s mot a duck, because we have an objective definition of duck.
- smolder 4y ago
  Right. Maybe if we had a down-to-the-atom perfect simulation of a duck, you could argue that it's a duck in another state of being. With the AI this deranged engineer decided to call sentient, we have the equivalent of a quacking simulator, not a full duck simulator or even a partial one. It is not thinking. It has nothing like a brain nor the essential components of thought.

joshuajill 4y ago

There is the Integrated Information Theory that attempts to solve the question of how to measure consciousness. But it's far from applicable at this point, even if promising. LaMDA was trained not only to learn how to dialog, but to self monitor and self improve. For me this seems close enough to self awareness to not completely dismiss Lemoine's argument.