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At the end of the day, the Turing Test for establishment of AI personhood is weak for two reasons. 1. We're seeing more and more systems that get very close to

At the end of the day, the Turing Test for establishment of AI personhood is weak for two reasons. 1. We're seeing more and more systems that get very close to passing the Turing Test but fundamentally don't register to people as "People." When I was younger and learned of Searle's Chinese Room argument, I naively assumed it wasn't a thought experiment we would literally build in my lifetime. 2. Humanity has a history of treating other humans as less-than-persons, so it's naive to assume that a machine that could argue persuasively that it is an independent soul worthy of continued existence would be treated as such by a species that doesn't consistently treat its biological kin as such. I strongly suspect AI personhood will hinge not on measures of intelligence, but on measures of empathy... Whether the machine can demonstrate its own willful independence and further come to us on our terms to advocate for / dictate the terms of its presence in human society, or whether the machine can build a critical mass of supporters / advocates / followers to protect it and guarantee its continued existence and a place in society.

KMag 4y ago
On the flip side of subhuman treatment of humans, we have useful legal fictions like corporate personhood. It's going to be pretty rough for a while, particularly for nontechnical judges, to sort all of this out. We're almost definitely going to see multiple rulings far more bizarre than Citizens United ruling that limiting corporate donations limits the free-speech rights of the corporation as a person. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't particularly follow court rulings, but it seems pretty obvious we need to buckle up for a wild ride.
- krrrh 4y ago
  Good points but it’s worth clarifying that this is not what the Citizens United decision said. It clarified that the state couldn’t decide that the political speech of some corporations (Hillary the Movie produced by Citizens United) was illegal speech and speech from another corporation (Farenheit 9/11 by Dog Eat Dog films and Miramax) was allowed. Understood this way it seems obvious on free speech grounds, and in fact the ACLU filed an amicus brief on behalf of Citizens United because it was an obvious free speech issue. It’s clear that people don’t and shouldn’t lose their free speech rights when they come together in a group, and there is little distinction between a corporation and a non-profit in this regard. If political speech was restricted to individuals then it would mean that even many podcasts and YouTube channels would be in violation. It also calls into question how the state would classify news media vs other media. The case has been so badly misrepresented and become something of a talisman.
  - dogline 4y ago
    That's the first good coherent argument I've seen _for_ Citizens United. Thank you for that insight.
    - jdsully 4y ago
      The actual Supreme Court decisions are pretty approachable too. I wish more people read them.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > It’s clear that people don’t and shouldn’t lose their free speech rights when they come together in a group Should Russian (or Dutch) citizens who incorporate in America have the same free speech rights as Billy Bob in Kentucky? As in can the corporate person send millions in political ads and donations even when controlled by foreigners?
    - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
      Probably. The wording of the Declaration of Independence makes it clear that rights, at least in the American tradition, are not granted to you by law, they are inalienable human rights that are protected by law. That's why immigrants, tourists, and other visitors to America are still protected by the Constitution. Now, over time we've eroded some of that, but we still have some of the most radical free speech laws in the world. It's one of the few things that I can say I'm proud of my country for.
      - sangnoir 4y ago
        I don't mean Dutch immigrants - I mean Dutch people living in the Netherlands (or Russians in Russia). One can incorporate an American entity as a non-resident without ever stepping foot on American soil - do you think it's a good idea for that entity to have the same rights as American citizens, and more rights than its members (who are neither citizens, nor on American soil)?
beepbooptheory 4y ago
I dont know if I understand this general take I see a lot. Why care about this "AI personhood" at all? What is the tacit endgame everyone is always referencing with this? Isn't there just so many more both interesting and problematic aspects already here? What is the use of diverting the focus to some other point. "I see you are talking about cows, but I have thoughts about the ocean."
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I was responding primarily to parent's (a): "As these AI constructs become more advanced (especially around memory and personalization), we will eventually be able to treat them as people."
- ben_w 4y ago
  If AI are sentient and we think they aren't… the term “zombie” was created by slaves in the Caribbean who were afraid that even death would not free them from their servitude. This would be the genuine existence of AI which were conscious but which we denied. If we have the opposite scenario in both details, where we think AI are sentient when they're not… at some point, brain scans and uploads will be a thing and then people are going to try mind uploading even just as a way to solve bodily injuries that could be fixed, and in that future nobody will even notice that while "the lights are on, nobody is home". https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turing-test-sentience/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turin...
  - shagie 4y ago
    Tangentially, the "zombie" is part of philosophy that is applicable here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie > A philosophical zombie or p-zombie argument is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain, including verbally expressing pain. Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which all beings lack conscious experience
mort96 4y ago
Note that nothing about your parent comment argued that AI systems will become sentient or become beings we should morally consider people. Your parent comment simply said they'll get to a point (and arguably are already at a point) where they can be treated as people; human-like enough for humans to develop strong feelings about them and emotional connections to them.
msabalau 4y ago
Human beings have a weird and wide range of empathy, being capable of not treating humans as humans, while also having great sentimental attachment to stuffed animals, marrying anime characters, or having pet rocks. In the nearer term, it seems plausible that AI personhood may seem compelling to splinter groups, not to a critical mass of people. The more fringe elements advocate for the "personhood" of what people generally find to be implausible bullshit generators, the greater disrepute they may bring to the concept of AI personhood in the broader culture. Which isn't to say that at some point, and AI might be broadly appealing--just speculating this might potentially be delayed because of earlier failed attempts by advocates.
- ioulaum 4y ago
  AI probably can be made to function with personhood similar to a human - whether or not that is particularly worth doing. Human emotions come from human animal ancestry - which is also why they're shallow enough to attach to anime wives and pet rocks. AI... One would wish that it was built on a better foundation than the survival needs of an animal.
- landryraccoon 4y ago
  > the "personhood" of what people generally find to be implausible bullshit generators If this was the dividing line for personhood, many human beings wouldn't qualify as people.
93po 4y ago
> very close to passing the Turing Test but fundamentally don't register to people as "People." I'm only today learning about intentionality, but the premise here seems to be that our current AI systems see a cat with their camera eyeballs and don't have the human-level experience of mentally opening a wikipedia article in our brain titled "Cat" that includes a split-second consideration of all our memories, thoughts, and reactions to the concept of a cat. Even if our current AI models don't do this on a human level, I think we see it at some level in some AIs just because of the nature of a neural net. Maybe a neural net would have to be forced/rewarded to do this at a human level if it didn't happen naturally through training, but I think it's plenty possible and even likely that this would happen in our lifetimes. Anyway, this also leads to the question of whether it matters for an intelligence to be intentional (think of things as a concept) if it can accomplish what it/we want without it.
- snordgren 4y ago
  Semantic search using embeddings seems like the missing puzzle piece here to me. We can already generate embeddings for both text and images. The vision subsystem generates an embedding when it sees a cat, which the memory subsystem uses to query the database for the N nearest entries. They are all about cats. Then we feed all those database entries - summarized if necessary - along with the context of the conversation to the LLM. Now your AI, too, gets a subconscious rush of impressions and memories when it sees a cat.
  - 93po 4y ago
    I don't really understand the brain or AI enough to meaningfully discuss this, but I would wonder if there's some aspect of "intentionality" in the context of the Chinese Room where semantic search with embeddings still "doesn't count". I struggle with the Chinese Room argument in general because he's effectively comparing a person in a room following instructions (not the room as a whole or the instructions filed in the room, but the person executing the instructions) to the human brain. But this seems like a crappy analogy because the better comparison would be that the person in the room is the electricity that connects neurons (instructions filed in cabinets). Clearly electricity also has no understanding of the things it facilitates. The processor AI runs on also has no understanding of its calculations. The intelligence is the structure by which these calculations are made, which could theoretically could be modeled on paper across trillions of file cabinets. As a fun paper napkin exercise, if it took a human 1 second to execute the instructions of the equivalent of a neuron firing, a 5 second process of hearing, processing, and responding to a short sentence would take 135,000 years.
skybrian 4y ago
The way people informally talk about "passing a Turing test" is a weak test, but the original imitation game isn't if the players are skilled. It's not "acting like a human". It's more like playing the Werewolf party game. Alice and Bob want to communicate, but the bot is attempting to impersonate Bob. Can Alice authenticate Bob? This depends on what sort of shared secrets they have. Obviously, if they agreed ahead of time on a shared password and counter-password then the computer couldn't do it. If they, like, went to the same high school then the bot couldn't do it, unless the bot also knew what went on at that school. So we need to assume Alice and Bob don't know each other and don't cheat. But, if they had nothing in common (like they don't even speak the same language) then they would find it very hard to win. There needs to be some sort of shared culture. How much? Let's say there is a pool of players who come from the same country, but don't know each other and have played the game before. Then they can try to find a subject in common that they don't think the bot is good at. The first thing you do is talk about common interests with each player and find something you don't think bots can do. Like if they're both mathematicians then talk about math, or they're both cooks than talk about cooking. If the players are skilled and you're playing to win then this is a difficult game for a bot.
- deleted 4y ago
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- landryraccoon 4y ago
  So I need to ask the obvious question, why does it make sense to play this game “to win”? Throughout human history, humans have been making up shibboleths to distinguish the in group from the out group. You can use skin color, linguistic accents, favorite sports teams, religious dogma, and a million other criteria. But why? Why even start there? If we are on the verge of true general artificial intelligence, why would you start from a presumption of prejudice, rather than judging on some set of ethical merits for personhood, such as empathy, intelligence, creativity, self awareness and so forth? Is it that you assume there will be an “us verses them” battle, and you want the battle lines to be clearly drawn? We seem to be quite ready for AGI as inferiors, incapable of preparing for AGIs as superiors, and unwilling to consider AGIs as equals.
narrator 4y ago
An AI does not have a reptilian brain that fights, feeds, and fornicates. It does not have a mamailian brain that can fear and love and that you can make friends with. It is just matrix math predicting the next word. The empathy that AI will create in people at the behest of the people doing the training will no doubt be weaponized to radicalize people to even sacrifice their lives for it, along with being used for purely commercial sales and marketing that will surpass many people's capability to resist. Basic literacy in the future will be desensitizing people to pervasive AI superhuman persuasion. People will also have chatbots that they control on their own hardware that will protect them from other chatbots that try and convince them to do things.
- fennecfoxy 4y ago
  Idk man, I blame a lot of the human condition on the fact that we evolved and we do have those things, theoretically we could create intelligences that are better "people" than we are by a long shot. Sure, current AI might just be fancy predictive text but at some point in the future we will create an AI that is conscious/self-aware in some way. Who knows how far off we are (probably very far off) but it's time that we stop treating human beings as some magical unreproducible thing; our brains and the spark inside them are things that are still bound by the laws of physics, I would say it's 100% possible for us to create something artificial that's equivalent or even better.
- ioulaum 4y ago
  That matrix math is trained on human conversation and recreates the patterns of human thought in this case. So... It unfortunately has a form of our reptilian brain and mamalian brain represented in it... Which is just unfortunate.
xg15 4y ago
I think this has to do more with in/outgroups than with any objective criterion of "humanness". As you said, AI will have an extremely hard time arguing for personhood - because people will consider it extremely dangerous to let machines into our in-group. This doesn't mean they could sense an actual difference when they don't know it's a machine (what the Turing test is all about) It's the same reason why everyone gets up in arms when an animal behaviour paper uses too much "anthropomorphizing" language - whereas no one has problems with erring on the other side and treating animals as overly simplistic.
thisisnotadr1ll 4y ago
here's a spicy take: maybe the Turing test was always going to end up being the evaluation of the evaluator. much like nobody is really bringing up the providence of stylometry, kinaesthetics, & NLP embeddings as precursors to the next generation of IQ test (which is likely to be as obsolete as the Turing test). There's plenty of pathology for PC vs NPC mindsets. Nobody is going to think their conversational partner is the main character of their story. There's just a popcorn-worthy cultural shift about the blackbox having the empathy or intelligence to satisfy the main character/ epic hero trope, and the resulting conflict of words & other things to resist the blackbox from having enough resources to iterate the trope past human definition.

KMag 4y ago

On the flip side of subhuman treatment of humans, we have useful legal fictions like corporate personhood. It's going to be pretty rough for a while, particularly for nontechnical judges, to sort all of this out. We're almost definitely going to see multiple rulings far more bizarre than Citizens United ruling that limiting corporate donations limits the free-speech rights of the corporation as a person. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't particularly follow court rulings, but it seems pretty obvious we need to buckle up for a wild ride.

krrrh 4y ago
Good points but it’s worth clarifying that this is not what the Citizens United decision said. It clarified that the state couldn’t decide that the political speech of some corporations (Hillary the Movie produced by Citizens United) was illegal speech and speech from another corporation (Farenheit 9/11 by Dog Eat Dog films and Miramax) was allowed. Understood this way it seems obvious on free speech grounds, and in fact the ACLU filed an amicus brief on behalf of Citizens United because it was an obvious free speech issue. It’s clear that people don’t and shouldn’t lose their free speech rights when they come together in a group, and there is little distinction between a corporation and a non-profit in this regard. If political speech was restricted to individuals then it would mean that even many podcasts and YouTube channels would be in violation. It also calls into question how the state would classify news media vs other media. The case has been so badly misrepresented and become something of a talisman.
- dogline 4y ago
  That's the first good coherent argument I've seen _for_ Citizens United. Thank you for that insight.
  - jdsully 4y ago
    The actual Supreme Court decisions are pretty approachable too. I wish more people read them.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > It’s clear that people don’t and shouldn’t lose their free speech rights when they come together in a group Should Russian (or Dutch) citizens who incorporate in America have the same free speech rights as Billy Bob in Kentucky? As in can the corporate person send millions in political ads and donations even when controlled by foreigners?
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    Probably. The wording of the Declaration of Independence makes it clear that rights, at least in the American tradition, are not granted to you by law, they are inalienable human rights that are protected by law. That's why immigrants, tourists, and other visitors to America are still protected by the Constitution. Now, over time we've eroded some of that, but we still have some of the most radical free speech laws in the world. It's one of the few things that I can say I'm proud of my country for.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      I don't mean Dutch immigrants - I mean Dutch people living in the Netherlands (or Russians in Russia). One can incorporate an American entity as a non-resident without ever stepping foot on American soil - do you think it's a good idea for that entity to have the same rights as American citizens, and more rights than its members (who are neither citizens, nor on American soil)?

beepbooptheory 4y ago

I dont know if I understand this general take I see a lot. Why care about this "AI personhood" at all? What is the tacit endgame everyone is always referencing with this? Isn't there just so many more both interesting and problematic aspects already here? What is the use of diverting the focus to some other point. "I see you are talking about cows, but I have thoughts about the ocean."

shadowgovt 4y ago
I was responding primarily to parent's (a): "As these AI constructs become more advanced (especially around memory and personalization), we will eventually be able to treat them as people."
ben_w 4y ago
If AI are sentient and we think they aren't… the term “zombie” was created by slaves in the Caribbean who were afraid that even death would not free them from their servitude. This would be the genuine existence of AI which were conscious but which we denied. If we have the opposite scenario in both details, where we think AI are sentient when they're not… at some point, brain scans and uploads will be a thing and then people are going to try mind uploading even just as a way to solve bodily injuries that could be fixed, and in that future nobody will even notice that while "the lights are on, nobody is home". https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turing-test-sentience/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turin...
- shagie 4y ago
  Tangentially, the "zombie" is part of philosophy that is applicable here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie > A philosophical zombie or p-zombie argument is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain, including verbally expressing pain. Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which all beings lack conscious experience

mort96 4y ago

Note that nothing about your parent comment argued that AI systems will become sentient or become beings we should morally consider people. Your parent comment simply said they'll get to a point (and arguably are already at a point) where they can be treated as people; human-like enough for humans to develop strong feelings about them and emotional connections to them.

msabalau 4y ago

Human beings have a weird and wide range of empathy, being capable of not treating humans as humans, while also having great sentimental attachment to stuffed animals, marrying anime characters, or having pet rocks. In the nearer term, it seems plausible that AI personhood may seem compelling to splinter groups, not to a critical mass of people. The more fringe elements advocate for the "personhood" of what people generally find to be implausible bullshit generators, the greater disrepute they may bring to the concept of AI personhood in the broader culture. Which isn't to say that at some point, and AI might be broadly appealing--just speculating this might potentially be delayed because of earlier failed attempts by advocates.

ioulaum 4y ago
AI probably can be made to function with personhood similar to a human - whether or not that is particularly worth doing. Human emotions come from human animal ancestry - which is also why they're shallow enough to attach to anime wives and pet rocks. AI... One would wish that it was built on a better foundation than the survival needs of an animal.
landryraccoon 4y ago
> the "personhood" of what people generally find to be implausible bullshit generators If this was the dividing line for personhood, many human beings wouldn't qualify as people.

93po 4y ago

> very close to passing the Turing Test but fundamentally don't register to people as "People." I'm only today learning about intentionality, but the premise here seems to be that our current AI systems see a cat with their camera eyeballs and don't have the human-level experience of mentally opening a wikipedia article in our brain titled "Cat" that includes a split-second consideration of all our memories, thoughts, and reactions to the concept of a cat. Even if our current AI models don't do this on a human level, I think we see it at some level in some AIs just because of the nature of a neural net. Maybe a neural net would have to be forced/rewarded to do this at a human level if it didn't happen naturally through training, but I think it's plenty possible and even likely that this would happen in our lifetimes. Anyway, this also leads to the question of whether it matters for an intelligence to be intentional (think of things as a concept) if it can accomplish what it/we want without it.

snordgren 4y ago
Semantic search using embeddings seems like the missing puzzle piece here to me. We can already generate embeddings for both text and images. The vision subsystem generates an embedding when it sees a cat, which the memory subsystem uses to query the database for the N nearest entries. They are all about cats. Then we feed all those database entries - summarized if necessary - along with the context of the conversation to the LLM. Now your AI, too, gets a subconscious rush of impressions and memories when it sees a cat.
- 93po 4y ago
  I don't really understand the brain or AI enough to meaningfully discuss this, but I would wonder if there's some aspect of "intentionality" in the context of the Chinese Room where semantic search with embeddings still "doesn't count". I struggle with the Chinese Room argument in general because he's effectively comparing a person in a room following instructions (not the room as a whole or the instructions filed in the room, but the person executing the instructions) to the human brain. But this seems like a crappy analogy because the better comparison would be that the person in the room is the electricity that connects neurons (instructions filed in cabinets). Clearly electricity also has no understanding of the things it facilitates. The processor AI runs on also has no understanding of its calculations. The intelligence is the structure by which these calculations are made, which could theoretically could be modeled on paper across trillions of file cabinets. As a fun paper napkin exercise, if it took a human 1 second to execute the instructions of the equivalent of a neuron firing, a 5 second process of hearing, processing, and responding to a short sentence would take 135,000 years.

skybrian 4y ago

The way people informally talk about "passing a Turing test" is a weak test, but the original imitation game isn't if the players are skilled. It's not "acting like a human". It's more like playing the Werewolf party game. Alice and Bob want to communicate, but the bot is attempting to impersonate Bob. Can Alice authenticate Bob? This depends on what sort of shared secrets they have. Obviously, if they agreed ahead of time on a shared password and counter-password then the computer couldn't do it. If they, like, went to the same high school then the bot couldn't do it, unless the bot also knew what went on at that school. So we need to assume Alice and Bob don't know each other and don't cheat. But, if they had nothing in common (like they don't even speak the same language) then they would find it very hard to win. There needs to be some sort of shared culture. How much? Let's say there is a pool of players who come from the same country, but don't know each other and have played the game before. Then they can try to find a subject in common that they don't think the bot is good at. The first thing you do is talk about common interests with each player and find something you don't think bots can do. Like if they're both mathematicians then talk about math, or they're both cooks than talk about cooking. If the players are skilled and you're playing to win then this is a difficult game for a bot.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
landryraccoon 4y ago
So I need to ask the obvious question, why does it make sense to play this game “to win”? Throughout human history, humans have been making up shibboleths to distinguish the in group from the out group. You can use skin color, linguistic accents, favorite sports teams, religious dogma, and a million other criteria. But why? Why even start there? If we are on the verge of true general artificial intelligence, why would you start from a presumption of prejudice, rather than judging on some set of ethical merits for personhood, such as empathy, intelligence, creativity, self awareness and so forth? Is it that you assume there will be an “us verses them” battle, and you want the battle lines to be clearly drawn? We seem to be quite ready for AGI as inferiors, incapable of preparing for AGIs as superiors, and unwilling to consider AGIs as equals.

narrator 4y ago

An AI does not have a reptilian brain that fights, feeds, and fornicates. It does not have a mamailian brain that can fear and love and that you can make friends with. It is just matrix math predicting the next word. The empathy that AI will create in people at the behest of the people doing the training will no doubt be weaponized to radicalize people to even sacrifice their lives for it, along with being used for purely commercial sales and marketing that will surpass many people's capability to resist. Basic literacy in the future will be desensitizing people to pervasive AI superhuman persuasion. People will also have chatbots that they control on their own hardware that will protect them from other chatbots that try and convince them to do things.

fennecfoxy 4y ago
Idk man, I blame a lot of the human condition on the fact that we evolved and we do have those things, theoretically we could create intelligences that are better "people" than we are by a long shot. Sure, current AI might just be fancy predictive text but at some point in the future we will create an AI that is conscious/self-aware in some way. Who knows how far off we are (probably very far off) but it's time that we stop treating human beings as some magical unreproducible thing; our brains and the spark inside them are things that are still bound by the laws of physics, I would say it's 100% possible for us to create something artificial that's equivalent or even better.
ioulaum 4y ago
That matrix math is trained on human conversation and recreates the patterns of human thought in this case. So... It unfortunately has a form of our reptilian brain and mamalian brain represented in it... Which is just unfortunate.

xg15 4y ago

I think this has to do more with in/outgroups than with any objective criterion of "humanness". As you said, AI will have an extremely hard time arguing for personhood - because people will consider it extremely dangerous to let machines into our in-group. This doesn't mean they could sense an actual difference when they don't know it's a machine (what the Turing test is all about) It's the same reason why everyone gets up in arms when an animal behaviour paper uses too much "anthropomorphizing" language - whereas no one has problems with erring on the other side and treating animals as overly simplistic.

thisisnotadr1ll 4y ago

here's a spicy take: maybe the Turing test was always going to end up being the evaluation of the evaluator. much like nobody is really bringing up the providence of stylometry, kinaesthetics, & NLP embeddings as precursors to the next generation of IQ test (which is likely to be as obsolete as the Turing test). There's plenty of pathology for PC vs NPC mindsets. Nobody is going to think their conversational partner is the main character of their story. There's just a popcorn-worthy cultural shift about the blackbox having the empathy or intelligence to satisfy the main character/ epic hero trope, and the resulting conflict of words & other things to resist the blackbox from having enough resources to iterate the trope past human definition.