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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 l

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.

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.