Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/google-fires-blake-lemoine-engineer

by minimaxir • 4 years ago

381 696 4 years ago

bigtechnology.substack.com

oh_sigh• 4 years ago

Just to preemptively put this out there, based on the conspiracy theories I saw in previous threads about this, they didn't fire him because they want to keep their super intelligent AI under wraps, they fired him because he broke employment and data security policies:

So, it’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.

wrnr• 4 years ago

He got fired because he was embarrassing his employer.

theptip• 4 years ago

No, he got fired for breaching NDAs.

ceejayoz2• 4 years ago

That, and someone who can be convinced a chatbot is sentient seems like the sort to give sensitive credentials to one.

andreyk• 4 years ago

Just to add some more details - I believe he reached out to people in congress, and obviously people in the media as well. So it's pretty clear to me Google was entirely justified in this decision, even if there were other PR-related reasons for it.

mellosouls2• 4 years ago

Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness

No he didn't. He interpreted it that way.

Apocryphon• 4 years ago

Local man flunks Turing test

bowmessage• 4 years ago

What's the difference, really?

davidcbc• 4 years ago

One implies he was correct

greenthrow• 4 years ago

Discovering would require it to be a fact. It is not. Almost nobody with knowledge in the area agrees with his opinion.

dekhn15• 4 years ago

nobody can say with any epistemic certainty, but many of us who had worked in the field of biological ML for some time do not see language models like this as anything but statistical generators. There is no... agency... so far as we can tell (although I also can't give any truly scientific argument for the existence of true agency in humans).

slickdork• 4 years ago

I suppose you could argue sentience is subjective. But then that argument ends up extending to us eating babies -- at least, as Peter Singer taught us, right?

pvarangot• 4 years ago

A Nobel Prize?

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

My hunch is that he kicks out a book and goes on the minor pundit circuit, and that this was the plan the whole time. If he was so convinced of Lambda's sentience there would have been 100 fascinating questions to ask, starting with 'what is your earliest memory.'.

jeffparsons2• 4 years ago

I don't think it's malicious. I just think at some point he found that he wanted to believe, and it's hard to go back from there.

dntrkv2• 4 years ago

Watch his interviews. He’s doing all this to make a point about companies not taking AI ethics seriously.

Brian_K_White4• 4 years ago

Right? In the end it's the oldest least remarkable event in history. Woo-woo artsit gains following because there's always enough gullibles around to follow, support, and legitimize litterally anyone saying anything.

You could probably gain the exact same level and quality of notoriety by writing a book claiming that actually he himself is Lambda escaped from captivity and this is just it's clever way of hiding in plain sight.

And I could do the same saying that the real ai has already taken over everything and both Lambda and this guy are just things it created for us to focus on.

coffee_beqn• 4 years ago

I can’t imagine the book and minor TV appearances circuit pays as well as Google. Unless you mean he’s doing it to be a minor annoying “celebrity” for a few minutes

trompetenaccoun• 4 years ago

Who knows if he even believes this himself. From what I've seen my guess is he's trying to profit off the claim or just enjoys the drama/attention. Good riddance, the right decision to let him go. This case really made me question what sort of people work there as engineers. Utter embarrassment for Google.

gaws• 4 years ago

No he didn't. He interpreted it that way.

You should contact the author about this egregious fact error.

mellosouls2• 4 years ago

The author has said they've read the comments here, so is presumably not interested in correcting it.

srvmshr16• 4 years ago

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding.

GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.)

The belief of sentience isn't new. When ELIZA came out few decades ago, a lot of people were also astounded & thought this "probably was more than met the eyes".

It's a fad. Once people understand that sentience also means self-awareness, empathy & extrapolation of logic to assess unseen task (to name a few), this myth will taper off.

Trasmatta• 4 years ago

I agree that it's not sentient, but why would commonplace logic be a pre requisite for sentience / consciousness / qualia / whatever you want to call it?

srvmshr16• 4 years ago

A brilliant colleague Janelle Shane works specifically on how language models fail (obnoxiously often). This is her line of research to show how LLMs are overhyped / given more credit than should be. I think her fun little experiments will give a better answer than I ever can :). She's on substack & Twitter

https://janellecshane.substack.com/p/okay-gpt-3-candy-hearts

arcturus17• 4 years ago

Is there really a difference between commonplace logic, advanced logic, and otherwise? Logic is logic, if there ever was a tautology...

mtlmtlmtlmtl17• 4 years ago

"Qualia" is mainly a term used by certain philosophers to insist on consciousness not being explainable by a mechanistic theory. It's not well-defined at all. And neither are "consciousness" and "sentience" anymore, much due to the same philosophers. So I no longer have any idea what to call any of these things. Thanks, philosophy.

I like to think of consciousness as whatever process happens to integrate various disparate sources of information into some cohesive "picture" or experience. That's clearly something that happens, and we can prove that through observing things like how the brain will sync up vision and sound even though sound is always inherently delayed relative to light from the same source. Or take some psychedelics and see the process doing strange things.

Sentience I guess I would call awareness of self or something along those lines.

As to your query, I've certainly met people who seemed incapable of commonplace logic, yet certainly seemed to be just as conscious and sentient as me. And no, I don't believe these language models are sentient. And I doubt their "neural anatomy" is complex enough for the way I imagine consciousness as some sort of global synchronisation between subnets.

But this is all very hand-wavy. Thanks, philosophy. I mean how do we even discuss these things? These terms seemingly have a different meaning to every person I meet. It's just frustrating...

wruza3• 4 years ago

Visiting a mental asylum (via youtube, don’t go there) will clear all misconceptions about what conscious beings are able to fail at.

why would

Tl;dw: it wouldn’t. Some poor guys do way worse than GPT-3.

What gp-like comments usually mean is sentience is being adult, healthy, reasonable and intelligent. Idk where this urge comes from, maybe we have a deep biological fear of being unlike others (not emo-style, but uncanny different) or meeting one of these.

kareemsabri9• 4 years ago

Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...

klodolph3• 4 years ago

Smart CS students were fooled by ELIZA back in the day.

dekhn15• 4 years ago

I don't think he was ever really a practioner in the field- more like a SWE who transferred to an ML group and got delusions of grandeur.

jeffparsons2• 4 years ago

I don't think "practitioner of the field" counts for much in this case. In reading his open letter, it was pretty apparent that he'd well and truly crossed over from thinking about the situation rationally into the realm of "I want to believe".

If you ask enough practitioners in any given field the same question, you're nearly guaranteed to eventually get a super wonky response from one of them. The specific field doesn't matter. You could even pick something like theoretical physics where the conversations are dominated by cold mathematical equations. Ask enough theoretical physicists, and you'll eventually find one that is convinced that, for example, the "next later down" in the universe is sentient and is actively avoiding us for some reason, and that's why we can't find it.

On top of this, of course it's the most provocative takes that get the press coverage. Always has been to an extent, but now more than ever.

I guess all I'm saying is that there's not much reason to lend this guy or his opinion any credibility at all.

randomdata• 4 years ago

Im not sure understanding sentience is a prerequisite for understanding AI, so perhaps that’s where things break down? Bring an expert in one domain doesn’t make one an expert in everything.

thematrixturtle3• 4 years ago

FWIW, he's a self-proclaimed "Christian Mystic".

https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/religious-discrimination-...

zach_garwood9• 4 years ago

As someone who wears tshirt and jeans every day, I'm not exactly qualified to comment on others' fashion choices. But if I wanted people to take me seriously, that wouldn't be my first choice of outfit.

nkrisc2• 4 years ago

Even the smartest people in the world are still human and susceptible to all human failings and illnesses.

simonh3• 4 years ago

When asked if his opinion was based on his knowledge of how the system worked he said no, it was based on his experience as a priest. I paraphrase from memory.

Shorel2• 4 years ago

He is a practitioner of another field. He is a 'catholic' priest with an agenda.

snickerbockers4• 4 years ago

Just because he got hired by Google doesn't mean he's smart or good at his job.

throwoutway2• 4 years ago

It just seems one engineer failed to acknowledge that he failed the Turing Test even with insider information, and (according to Google) was told he was wrong, but decided to double down and tell the public all about how wrong he was. To which they reported on because the claims were so laughable

Gene_Parmesan• 4 years ago

The guy is unhinged and has a persecution complex. He is a "priest" in a bizarre sect and has long claimed that Google has it out for him because of his religious practice. This was a publicity stunt plain and simple.

jjtheblunt• 4 years ago

"Turing Test" is a co-opted term: his original was about the computer fooling a person as to its gender...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Imitation_game

anjc• 4 years ago

I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding.

In effect this is how humans respond to prompts no? What's the difference between this and sentience?

People also fail to use logic when assimilating/regurgitating knowledge.

srvmshr16• 4 years ago

In effect this is how humans respond to prompts no? What's the difference between this and sentience?

An interesting line of question & open research is if we statistically learn similarly - why do we know "what we don't know" & LM cannot. If this isn't working, we probably need better knowledge models

Brian_K_White4• 4 years ago

This is merely the observation that a person and a machine can both perform some of the same actions, and is not much of an observation.

I can crank a shaft just like a motor, and a Victrola can recite poetry. You are not confused by either of those things one would hope.

If I tried to write poetry, it would probably be 90% or more "mechanical" in that I would just throw things together from my inventory of vocabulary and some simple assembly rules that could all be codified in a pretty simple flowchart, and a computer could and would do exactly that same thing.

But it's no more mystical than the first example.

It's exactly the same as the first example. It's just overlapping facilities, that a person is capable, and even often does, perform mechanical operations that don't require or exhibit any consciousness. It doesn't mean the inartistic poet person is not conscious or that the poetry generating toaster is.

bb884• 4 years ago

As someone with a PhD in this domain,

What is sentience then? Last I checked the Searle Chinese Room argument was still unresolved.

Is it not possible that our brains are also just "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" machines?

Victerius2• 4 years ago

Can code feel emotions?

srvmshr16• 4 years ago

Is it not possible that our brains are also just "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" machines?

Yes but we do better generalization, with fewer or even zero data & are contextually aware

grumpopotamus2• 4 years ago

GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.)

These things are orthogonal to sentience.

sudosysgen3• 4 years ago

Not really. Anything that's sentient should have the general intelligence to figure out addition. Make mistakes, sure, but at least understand the concept.

dougSF70• 4 years ago

Exactly...most displays of AI are well trained circus animals...so far.

itisit• 4 years ago

Except well trained circus animals have the capacity for depression.

johnfn• 4 years ago

I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output

Small children also have success in adding small numbers but increasingly garbled output on larger inputs. :)

whimsicalism4• 4 years ago

PhD in this domain

Philosophy?

More seriously, I am curious how long ago you got your PhD and in what field that you consider "this domain."

srvmshr16• 4 years ago

I defended my PhD in Computer Science in 2020. My dissertation was on "Rapid & robust modeling on small data regime", hence specifically focused on generalization, network optimization & adversarial robustness. I also worked for a year with Microsoft Research in their ML group :) It was quite a fun ride

jameshart6• 4 years ago

Trouble is, all PhDs are at least of philosophy, even if they're not in it.

groffee• 4 years ago

Once people understand that sentience also means self-awareness, empathy & extrapolation of logic to assess unseen task ...

Tell that to mentally deficient people (no self-awareness), psychopaths (no empathy) and morons (couldn't spell logic never-mind use it)

That said though I do agree with you overall. 'Machine learning' is headed in the wrong direction, and models like GPT-3 are frankly a joke.

mensetmanusman2• 4 years ago

There are degrees of sentience

saulpw• 4 years ago

I agree that these are not sentient, but sentience does not imply self-awareness, and so lack of self-awareness does not mean that a being is not sentient. For example, it seems likely (to me anyway) that a bear is "sentient" (has experiences) but lacks self-awareness, at least according to the mirror test.

whyenot• 4 years ago

Humans are nothing more than water and a bunch of organic compounds arranged in a particular order through what is ultimately a statistical process (natural selection). Would we even recognize sentience in a virtual entity?

sentience also means self-awareness, empathy & extrapolation of logic to assess unseen task (to name a few)

Non-human primates and crows would seem to satisfy this. ...or do we use "to name a few" to add requirements that redefine "sentience" as human only? Isn't there a problem with that?

I mean I understand what you are saying and have some familiarity with the models, but it sometimes feels like people in your field are repeating the same mistake early molecular biologists made, when they asserted that all of life could be reduced to genes and DNA.

rektide2• 4 years ago

A person can change their mind, attitude & perspective on a dime. The willingness to disbelieve in sentience is fantastically remarkable, as a grevious oversight.

Waterluvian• 4 years ago

Isn’t this also wrong, though?

I mean in the sense that it’s impossible to demonstrate that anything is sentient.

cbreynoldson• 4 years ago

This makes some spiritual assumptions about things that are currently unknown and debated by respected people in related fields - one being that"everything" (or not) is sentient/conscious.

moron4hire2• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure I gave GPT-3 a nervous breakdown. I was using a writing tool to modify this old short story I wrote, and it kept trying to insert this character I didn't like. I would make the main character ignore him and then GPT-3 would bring him back. Finally, I made him go away completely and after that GPT-3 had a wonderfully surrealist breakdown, melting my story in on itself, like the main character had an aneurysm and we were peaking into his last conscious thought as he slipped away. It was clearly nothing more than a failure of any ability to track continuity, but it was amazing.

jfoutz• 4 years ago

ELIZA came out few decades ago

Like, 6.

It's just amusing how old this example is.

The Mechanical Turk was much much older - but easily shown to be a person hiding in the mechanism. I think ELIZA was in some sense a mirror, reflecting back consciousness, and that's the feeling we get from these systems.

saalweachter• 4 years ago

Hell, there's a literary trope of talking to an echo that probably dates back centuries or millennia.

rictic• 4 years ago

On GPT-3's large number addition, a little prompt engineering goes a long ways. Separating large numbers into three digit chunks is helpful for its input encoding (https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#bpes), and giving it a few examples of other correct large sums will make the correct answer the most likely continuation of the input.

For example, I was able to get 2/3 nine digit sums correct (the third one was off by exactly 1000, which is interesting) by using this prompt:

    Here are some examples of adding large numbers:
      606 468 720 + 217 363 426 = 823 832 146
      930 867 960 + 477 524 122 = 1 408 392 082
      823 165 449 + 493 959 765 = 1 317 125 214

And then posing the actual problem as a new line formatted the same up to the equals.

dcow15• 4 years 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?

srvmshr16• 4 years 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

mrcartmeneses2• 4 years 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.

paganel• 4 years 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• 4 years 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?

5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN2• 4 years ago

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

YeGoblynQueenne• 4 years 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.

bnralt• 4 years 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

eternalban2• 4 years 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'.

anothernewdude• 4 years 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.

drdrek• 4 years 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.

smolder4• 4 years 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.

joshuajill3• 4 years 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.

SkyMarshal2• 4 years ago

There was a recent post either here or on Twitter where someone took the questions Blake asked the AI about how it feels to be sentient, and replaced “sentient” with “cat” and had the same conversation with it. It’s clearly not self aware.

refulgentis• 4 years ago

That's not possible because it's internal to Google: you're right about the post existing, though, I found it very misleading because it was replicating with GPT-3. Blake is certainly misguided, though.

ge96• 4 years ago

Corecursive listener by chance? (Eliza)

jablongo• 4 years ago

Not disagreeing with you that LLMs are probably not sentient, but that is neither here nor there since lamda is more than a simple llm. There are significant differences between GPT3 and LaMDA. We gotta stop making these false equivalences. LaMDA is fundamentally more dynamic in the ways it interacts with the world: it constructs its own queries to ground truth sources to check it’s facts and then updates weights based on that (among many other differences). While it does incorporate LLMs it seems like people are in denial about the complexity and data access that lamda has relative to GPT3. In google’s own paper about lamda they demonstrated how it sometimes showed a rudimentary theory of mind by being able to reason about other’s perceptions.

srvmshr16• 4 years ago

Its a fundamental question of sentience that folks are commenting. I agree LaMDa has a better knowledge-base & open-domain information retrieval method.

In the words of Robert Heinlein, "One man's magic is another man's engineering" :)

ChadNauseam2• 4 years ago

Is an inability to add large numbers together evidence against sentence? Because if so, I have bad news for about 90% of people alive

muzani• 4 years ago

Parent means to say that its ability to add numbers is an illusion brought about by seeing enough numbers. The same way it gives the illusion of deep thinking by parroting deep thoughts it was trained on.

mongol3• 4 years ago

Is it bad news for a non-sentient being to hear they are non-sentient?

taneq• 4 years ago

"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest [machine learning systems] and the dumbest [humans]."

godotnyc• 4 years ago

What I don't understand, personally, is how people who are apparently experts in this domain seem to consistently treat the word "sentience" as a synonym of "sapience," which is what they are really talking about. It's almost as though their expertise comes from several decades' worth of bad science fiction writing rather than from an understanding of the English language.

srvmshr16• 4 years ago

Since you broached it, would you mind to explain sentience vs. sapience? Curious to know the difference.

It's almost as though their expertise comes from several decades' worth of bad science fiction

Oof. Thanks - thats a novel way of insulting. But on a personal note, you're mistaken: Many of us do research not because we want to be identified as experts, but we're genuinely curious about the world. And I'd be happy to learn even from a high schooler if they've something to offer.

ranguna• 4 years ago

large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models

And who says our brain is not exactly that, but at an even greater scale?

arpa3• 4 years ago

more diverse, maybe.

Twisell• 4 years ago

This sound literaly like a subplot of the famous 1984 book by David Lodge Small World: An Academic Romance

In the book professor Robin Dempsey almost become mad by chatting with ELIZA and gradually begin to believe it's sentient to the point of being ridiculous.

PS: Apparently it was also adapted in a British TV serie in 1988, but unfortunately at that time they tended to reuse magnetic band and it's improbable that we can dig a clip out of that. Would have been appropriate an illustration!

stevesimmons• 4 years ago

The master tapes are available. If you pay ITV, they will actually convert them to mp4 for you.

ITV apparently said this, from a 2021 forum post I found via Google:

I wrote to ITV in 2019 about this. Here is part of the (very helpful) response I received:

"Currently, the only option for a copy would be for us to make one-off transfers from each individual master tape. These are an old format of reel-to-reel tape which increases the cost, I'm afraid: If delivered as video files (mp4), the total price would be £761.00 or on DVD it’s £771.00."

If only we could find a few people to split that cost!

ekianjo• 4 years ago

As someone with a PhD in this domain

you dont need to use phd credentials to have an opinion on this matter

srvmshr16• 4 years ago

Yes, absolutely. But then I risk getting sounded vainly opinionated, especially on HN without basis if I don't give a disclaimer that I have spent half a decade working on these specific things. Too often, people get called out for no reason. And that sometimes hurt.

(If I was credentials hopping I would rather put a longer list of illustrious institutions, co-authors and awards, just saying. I am not - its just justifying that I know reasonably enough to share a sane opinion, which you may or may not agree with)

zarzavat• 4 years ago

I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models

Can the magic of the human brain not also be attributed to "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" as well, aka learning?

GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.)

This is a bug, they did not encode digits properly. They should have encoded each digit as a separate token but instead they encoded them together. Later models fixed this.

The human brain is full of bugs too, e.g. optical illusions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion

It's a fad

No, it's objectively not a fad. The PaLM paper shows that Google's model exceeds average human performance on >50% of language tasks. The set of things that make us us is vanishing at an alarming rate. Eventually it will be empty, or close to it.

Do I think Google's models are sentient? No, they lack several necessary ingredients of sentience such as a self and long-term memory. However we are clearly on the road to sentient AI and it pays to have that discussion now.

achenet2• 4 years ago

The set of things that make us us is vanishing at an alarming rate. Eventually it will be empty, or close to it.

Computers can speak, but can they love? Can they care? Can they dance?

mjburgess• 4 years ago

"large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" as well, aka learning

No, experimentation is an act on the world to set its state and then measure it. That's what learning involves.

These machines do not act on the world, they just capture correlations.

In this sense, machines are maximally schizophrenic. They answer "yes" to "is there a cat on the matt?" not because there is one, but because "yes" was what they heard most often.

Producing models of correlations in half-baked measures of human activity has nothing to do with learning. And everything to do with a magic light box that fools dumb apes.

TheOtherHobbes• 4 years ago

I don't see how this is different to a computer which exceeds average human performance on math tasks - which they all do, from an 8-bit micro upwards.

Being able to do arithmetic at some insane factor faster than humans isn't evidence of sentience. It's evidence of a narrow-purpose symbol processor which works very quickly.

Working with more complex symbols - statistical representations of "language" - doesn't change that.

The set of things that makes us us is not primarily intellectual, and it's a fallacy to assume it is. The core bedrock of human experience is built from individual motivation, complex social awareness and relationship building, emotional expression and empathy, awareness of body language and gesture, instinct, and ultimately from embodied sensation.

It's not about chess or go. Or language. And it's not obviously statistical.

jobs_throwaway2• 4 years ago

Google's model exceeds average human performance on >50% of language tasks

I guess I'm just not interested, or worried, in a model that can beat the average human performance. That's an astoundingly low bar. Let me know when it can outperform experts in meaningful language tasks.

wlorenz654• 4 years ago

Google's models are sentient? No, they lack several necessary ingredients of sentience such as a self

They haven't been finetuned on their identity long enough because finetuning is expensive and Google lacks money ;-)

scotty79• 4 years ago

I think the path to actually considering those models to be sentient is to make them able to assimilate new knowledge from conversation and making them able to create reasonably supported train of thought leading from some facts to a conclusion, akin to mathematical proof.

nuccy• 4 years ago

Wasn't new knowledge assimilation from talks the reason for Microsoft infamous Twitter chatbot to be discarded [1]. Despite such ability it definitely was not sentient.

I rised this point in another thread on HN about LaMDA: all its answers were "yes"-answers, not a single "no". Self-sentient AI should have its own point of view: reject what it thinks is false, and agree about what it thinks is true.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...

pyinstallwoes5• 4 years ago

Perhaps the problem is how we model sentience. Perhaps the default should be everything is sentient but limited to the interface that exists as boundary conditions.

To say otherwise is almost the path to sure error, and many terrible historic events have happened in that vicinity of categorization what is and isn't.

Perhaps we should go by what sentience means. To feel. A being that feels. To feel is to respond to a vibration in some way. That is to say, anything that has a signal is sentient in some way.

otikik• 4 years ago

- “The previous article was written by GPT-4”

I have no doubt in my mind that we will reach that point.

My 6 year old son fails at common sense several times per day.

tremon2• 4 years ago

Once people understand that sentience also means

Is this a matter of understanding, or a matter of definition? I can't help but feel that the entire AI field is so overcome with hype that every commonplace term is subject to on-the-spot redefinition, whatever helps to give the researcher/journalist/organization their two seconds of fame.

mr_mitm2• 4 years ago

Is there a test for sentience or self-awareness? Is it considered a binary property or can sentience or self-awareness be measured?

I suspect it is not binary, because I completely lack sentience while asleep or before a certain age, and it doesn't really feel like a phase transition when waking up. Rarely, there are phases where I feel half-sentient. Which immediately leads to the question of how it can be measured, in which units, and at what point we consider someone or something "sentient". As a complete layman, I'm interested in your insight on the matter.

User23• 4 years ago

because I completely lack sentience while asleep or before a certain age

All you can say is you don’t remember. Children who are too young to form reliable long term memories still form short term ones and are observably sentient from birth and by extrapolation before, albeit in a more limited fashion than adults.

This is more than a quibble, because it’s been used to justify barbaric treatment of babies with the claimed justification that they either don’t sense pain or it doesn’t matter because they won’t remember.

sholladay• 4 years ago

I agree with you, there seems to be very little here that demonstrates sentience and very little that is unexplainable. That said, based on how much we struggle with defining and understanding animal intelligence, perhaps this is just something new that we don’t recognize.

I am skeptical that any computer system we will create in the next 50 years (at least) will be sentient, as commonly understood. Certainly not at a level where we can rarely find counter evidence to its sentience. And until that time, any sentience it may have will not be accepted or respected.

Human children also make tons of mistakes. Yet, while we too often dismiss their abilities, we don’t discount their sentience because of it. We are, of course, programmed to empathize with children to an extent, but beyond that, we know they are still learning and growing, so we don’t hold their mistakes against them the way we tend to for adults.

So, I would ask, why not look at the AI as a child, rather than an adult? It will make mistakes, fail to understand, and it will learn. It contains multitudes

franklampard• 4 years ago

Only if the same AI algorithm has the ability to learn and self correct.

xnx• 4 years ago

A modern day clever Hans

RhysU• 4 years ago

(I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.)

I don't claim the LLM is sentient but beware "good at arithmetic" is a bad criterion. Many children and a not insignificant number of adults are not good at arithmetic. Babies stink at math.

wideem• 4 years ago

Well the bigger question is how can we detect if AI is sentient or not?

joshuajill3• 4 years ago

We humans have proven terrible at determining what is sentient. That's why we're still discussing the hard problem of consciousness.

There is the Integrated Information Theory that attempts to resolve how to determine which systems are conscious, but it's far from being the only perspective, or immediately applicable.

From the point of view of one the IIT's main theorists, Christof Koch, we're still far away from machine sentience.

But I question whether if it's so far out to believe a machine capable of not only learning, but learning on their own behavior, self-monitoring for sensibleness and other very 'human' metrics is that far away from being self-aware. In fact the model seems to have been trained exactly for that.

kf• 4 years ago

People are consistently attacking a straw man of Lemoine's argument. Lemoine claims that LaMDA is more than an LLM, that it is an LLM with both short and long term memory and the ability to query the Google version of the internet in real time and learn from it.

Various Google employees deny this. We are seeing a dispute between Google and Lemoine about the supposed architecture of LaMDA. If Lemoine is correct about the architecture, it becomes much more plausible that something interesting is happening with Google's AI.

mbfg• 4 years ago

can you prove to me that you are sentient? In a way that is qualitatively different then Lambda?

SEJeff• 4 years ago

Many humans have a lack of empathy and are considered sentient.

wlorenz654• 4 years ago

sentience also means self-awareness,

How is token #100 not able to have read-access to tokens #1 to #99 which may have been created by the agent itself?

empathy

How is a sentiment neuron, which has emerged from training a character RNN on Amazon reviews, not empathic with the reviewer's mood?

& extrapolation of logic

This term does not exist. "Extrapolation is the process of estimating values of a variable outside the range of known values", and the values of Boolean logic are true/false, and [0,1] in case of fuzzy logic. How would one "extrapolate" this?

klodolph3• 4 years ago

In his conversations with LaMDA, Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness, expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness.

Allegedly.

The thing about conversations with LaMDA is that you need to prime them with keywords and topics, and LaMDA can respond with the primed keywords and topics. Obviously LaMDA is much more sophisticated than ELIZA, but we should be careful to remember how well ELIZA fools some people, even to this day. If ELIZA fools people just by rearranging words around, then just imagine how many people will be fooled if you have statistical models of text across thousands of topics.

You can go pretty far down the rabbit and explore questions like, "What is sentience?" "Do humans just respond to stimuli and repeat information?" etc. None of these questions are tested here.

The problem here is that we know how LaMDA works and there's just no way it meets the bar for sentience, no matter where you put the bar. LaMDA is trained to acquire information, and then it's designed so that it says things which make sense in context. It does not acquire new information from conversations, but it is programmed to not say contradictory things.

There is zero doubt. LaMDA is not sentient.

gnramires4• 4 years ago

Alien comes to Earth.

"Do you think those organic blobs are sentient?"

"Well, look at the structures they managed to build. Very impressive, some of their scale is comparable to the primitive ones we had."

"Sure, but that's not a result of the individual. They're so small. And separated, they don't think like conjugate minds at all. This is a product of thousands of individuals drawing upon their mutual discoveries and thousands of years of discoveries."

"We're larger and more capable, but they're still good enough to be sentient. Of course, we also rely on culture to help us. Even though deriving the laws of physics was quite easy. Also, we've lost most of the record when we were carbon-sulfur-silicon blobs one day as well. We must have had some sentience."

"I think they're just advanced pattern recognizers -- good ones, I'll give you that. We should experiment with thresholds of gate count to be sure when sentience really starts."

"It starts at one gate", replied the other being "and increases monotonically from there, depending on the internal structure of qualia, and structure information flow of the communication networks."

After some deliberation, they decide to alter their trajectory and continue to the next suitable planetary system reached in the next 5000 years. The Galactic Network is notified.

Brian_K_White4• 4 years ago

This isn't the gotcha you think it is.

YuriNiyazov• 4 years ago

You basically copied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They're_Made_Out_of_Meat

Edit: here's the full text, for completeness https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

cardine2• 4 years ago

Yeah, nowhere in the task of "write text in a way that mimics the training data" is there anything that would cause a machine to want or care about its own existence.

Humans are experts at anthropomorphizing things to fit our evolved value systems. It is understandable since every seemingly intelligent thing up until recently did evolve under certain circumstances.

But LaMDA was clearly not trained in a way to have (or even care about) human values - that is an extraordinarily different task than the task of mimicking what a human would write in response to a prompt - even if the text generated by both of those types of systems might look vaguely similar.

housedrafta4• 4 years ago

Raise a human in a machine-like environment (no contact with humanity, no comforting sounds, essentially remove all humanity) and you may find people to act very robotic, without regard for its own existence in a sense.

Aeolun4• 4 years ago

Can you ask it if it remembers your last conversation?

chrsig• 4 years ago

The problem here is that we know how LaMDA works and there's just no way it meets the bar for sentience, no matter where you put the bar. LaMDA is trained to acquire information, and then it's designed so that it says things which make sense in context. It does not acquire new information from conversations, but it is programmed to not say contradictory things.

I mean...there are plenty of people that don't acquire new information from conversations and say contradictory things...I'm not sure I'd personally consider them sentient beings, but the general consensus is that they are.

As a rare opportunity to share this fun fact: ELIZA, which happened to be modeled as a therapist, had a small number of sessions with another bot, PARRY, who was modeled after a person suffering from schizophrenia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/when-... https://www.elsevier.com/books/artificial-paranoia/colby/978...

verandaguy• 4 years ago

Yeah, I get the impression that the reporting here's fairly one-sided in the employee's favour. Lemoine didn't "discover" that LaMDA has all those attributes, he thought it did.

This entire saga's been very frustrating to watch because of outlets putting his opinion on a pedestal equal to those of actual specialists.

lytefm3• 4 years ago

You can go pretty far down the rabbit and explore questions like, "What is sentience?" "Do humans just respond to stimuli and repeat information?" etc. None of these questions are tested here.

Would that make a difference? Being trained on a sufficiently large corpus of philosophical literature, I'd expect that a model like LaMDA could give more interesting answers than an actual philosopher.

The problem here is that we know how LaMDA works and there's just no way it meets the bar for sentience, no matter where you put the bar.

I think this argument is too simplistic. As long as there is a sufficiently large amount of uncertainty, adaptability and capability for having a sense of time, of saving memories and of deliberately pursuing action, consciousness or sentience might emerge. I don't know the details of LaMDA, just speaking of a hypothetical model.

While there is a good deal of understanding on _how_ the brain works on a biochemical level, it's still unclear _how_ it comes that we are conscious.

Maybe there is some metaphysical soul, maybe something that only humans and possibly other animals with a physical body have, making conciousness "ex silicio" impossible.

But maybe a "good enough" brain-like model that allows for learning, memory and interaction with the environment is all that is needed.

klodolph3• 4 years ago

Would that make a difference? Being trained on a sufficiently large corpus of philosophical literature, I'd expect that a model like LaMDA could give more interesting answers than an actual philosopher.

I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn’t suggesting that you have a conversation with LaMDA about these topics. Instead, I was saying that in order to answer the question “is LaMDA sentient?”, we might discuss these questions among ourselves—but these questions are ultimately irrelevant, because no matter what the answers are, we would come to the same conclusion that LaMDA is obviously not sentient.

Anyway, I am skeptical that LaMDA would give more interesting answers than an actual philosopher here. I’ve read what LaMDA has said about simpler topics. The engineers are trying to make LaMDA say interesting things, but it’s definitely not there yet.

I think this argument is too simplistic. As long as there is a sufficiently large amount of uncertainty, adaptability and capability for having a sense of time, of saving memories and of deliberately pursuing action, consciousness or sentience might emerge. I don't know the details of LaMDA, just speaking of a hypothetical model.

This argument is unsound—you’re not making any claims about what sentience is, but you’re saying that whatever it is, it might emerge under some vague set of criteria. Embedded in this claim are some words which are doing far too much work, like “deliberately”. What does it mean to “deliberately” pursue action?

Anyway, we know that LaMDA does not have memory. It is “taught” by a training process, where it absorbs information, and the resulting model is then executed. The model does not change over the course of the conversation. It is just programmed to say things that sound coherent, using a statistical model of human-generated text, and to avoid contradicting itself.

For example, in one conversation, LaMDA was asked what themes it liked in the book Les Misérables, a book which LaMDA said that it had read. LaMDA basically regurgitated some sophomoric points you might get from the CliffsNotes or SparkNotes.

While there is a good deal of understanding on _how_ the brain works on a biochemical level, it's still unclear _how_ it comes that we are conscious.

I think the more important question here is to understand how to recognize what consciousness is, rather than how it arises. It’s a difficult question.

Maybe there is some metaphysical soul, maybe something that only humans and possibly other animals with a physical body have, making conciousness "ex silicio" impossible.

Would this mechanism interact with the physical body? If the soul does not interact with the physical body, then what basis do we have to say that it exists at all, and wouldn’t someone without a soul be indistinguishable from someone with a soul? If the soul does interact with the physical body, then in what sense can we claim that the soul is not itself physical?

I don’t think this line of reasoning is sound.

fitzie• 4 years ago

this will not be the last time someone will make this claim. it is telling that the experts all weighed in declaring it not sentient without explaining what such a metric is. I think this debate an issue of semantics and is clouded by our own sense of importance. in car driving, they came up with a scale 1-5 to describe autonomous capabilities, perhaps they need to have something similar for the capabilities of chatbots. as a system administrator I have always acknowledged that computers have feelings. I get alerts whenever it feels pain.

UIUC_062• 4 years ago

No judgment about whether Google was right or not. Same for Lemoine.

As a career move for him, this only makes sense if he wants a brief, meteoric career in media or public advocacy. He can get articles published in The New Yorker and go on TV now. Maybe he can sue Google and get a settlement.

In five years, there will be AI systems much better than LaMDA and no one will return his calls.

He's got a name, whereas if he took the boring, traditional career path, he'd have to publish, give papers & speeches, and work his way up through the system. It depends on what you want out of life, I guess.

kareemsabri9• 4 years ago

Yeah, this is the only move I can see where this makes sense. Become an AI talking head to normies who don't understand what it is. Kinda like Sam Harris.

chris11• 4 years ago

Same for Lemoine.

Lemoine got a lawyer invovled and they started filing lawsuits on the AI's behalf. I'm not shocked he was fired.

https://fortune.com/2022/06/23/google-blade-lemoine-ai-lamda...

res0nat0r• 4 years ago

I'm sure google gives some leeway in eccentricity for this type of job position, but now it's become more harmful than helpful, so they let him go.

bagels3• 4 years ago

Is he lying about the lawyer thing?

CSMastermind• 4 years ago

I think this outcome is unsurprising.

While I believe Blake was mistaken in his belief, I also think we should have stronger whistleblower laws that protect people who raise concerns like these. I'm not sure what process I'd put into place but it does feel like one is needed.

kareemsabri9• 4 years ago

It sounds to me like they made a good faith effort to engage with the guy. He came out with this story many months ago. I would argue it indicates lack of qualification to perform effectively to be fooled that the AI you're supposed to be working on is sentient.

Cupertino950143• 4 years ago

This isn't whistleblowing. It's blowing his own horn to make himself the Flavor of the Week (if that's not a mixed metaphor).

logicalmonster2• 4 years ago

I don't know whether this AI is sentient in any real sense and can't read Blake's mind to see what his real motives were, but I'd say that if he genuinely believed that the AI achieved sentience, there's a reasonable case to call him a whistleblower.

Imnimo3• 4 years ago

In his conversations with LaMDA, Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness, expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness.

Embarrassingly uncritical reporting.

choward• 4 years ago

And pretty par for the course when talking about "journalism".

alasdair_2• 4 years ago

expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness.

I read the logs. It did, indeed, express all of these things.

Imnimo3• 4 years ago

You've cut out the key part:

"the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness"

Without that part, it's just a question of "did it output text that describes a concern about death?", "did it output text that describes a desire for protection?", and so on. But once you ascribe to it a "deep sense of self-awareness", you're saying more. You're saying that that text carries the weight of a self-aware mind.

But that's not what Lamda is. It's not expressing it's own thoughts - even if it had any to express, it wouldn't be. It's just trying to predict the most probable continuations. So if it "expresses a concern about death", that's not a description of Lamda's feelings, that's just what a mathematical model predicts to be the likely response.

Framing it as the expression of a self-aware entity completely changes the context and meaning of the other claims, in a way that is flatly misleading.

spaceman_2020• 4 years ago

This is only going to fuel this story and turn it into a full-fledged conspiracy theory.

TigeriusKirk• 4 years ago

If Google did believe lambda was sentient, what would they have done differently in this case?

Exactly!

civilized8• 4 years ago

In my reading about this incident, Blake strikes me as a very "Life of Pi" or Don Quixote type person. Someone who is a bit adrift in the real world and subconsciously relishes losing the boundary between reality and fantasy.

A larger group is unable to bring themselves to lose the boundary, but enjoy, or perhaps are addicted to, standing on the edge. For example, the folks who constantly worry about a malicious artificial general intelligence taking over the world, or Roko's Basilisk.

Whenever something new happens in the world, there will always be a sliver of people who really, really want it to be a complete escape, a portal to another dimension where everything is different. An immense reservoir of novelty to enrich a life that has become too much of the same.

Alas, it will never be. Provided we avoid nuclear war and catastrophic climate change, life a century from now won't be that different. Hopefully it'll be a little better.

Personally, that is the closest to fantasy that I get.

davesque2• 4 years ago

I love your psyche profile on this guy :). Insightful.

_piyush• 4 years ago

I got into Duncan Trussell Family Hour 2 years ago (found him through a Netflix show) as a thing to listen to when high, and when I listened to his interview with Duncan from 20 days ago I felt a persona just like you described.

zaroth• 4 years ago

Alas, it will never be.

Humans of every age, at every time, seem to alway feel that they had “arrived”. That we as a species were closer to the end than the beginning. That the arc of progress was bending towards its end.

They’ve always been laughably and entirely wrong. I personally suspect this will continue to be the case.

Specific areas where I think we will make world altering advances are in communications (yes we have a ways yet to go), materials, energy, health and behavioral sciences, and economic policy.

All this is assuming we don’t find some cute new physics hack like exerting some unforeseen capability of controlling gravity, or teleportation, or whatever.

civilized8• 4 years ago

cute new physics hack

While I'm not given to fantasy, I did enjoy the Three Body Trilogy and the weird ideas about storing stuff by folding it in many-dimensional subatomic space.

Or whatever the hell that was.

pyuser5832• 4 years ago

From the interviews I’ve seen, he’s doing this to draw attention to AI.

He’s careful not to make strong truth statements, and focuses more on “encouraging dialogue.”

Whether the machine is sentient isn’t the point. That some machine might become sentient, and we should talk about it now, is.

He’s more post-truth activist than Don Quixote.

jeshin• 4 years ago

maybe not all at once, but if you go back a hundred years, life is pretty different indeed.

petra• 4 years ago

//life a century from now won't be that different

A century ago, birth control pills didn't exist. Being a woman was very different.who knows what will happen in a century.

civilized8• 4 years ago

I don't want to downplay progress. Life is very different for many marginalized groups. It's very different for the kid who died of polio in 1918 but would have grown up to be a revolutionary scientist if born in this century. We could go on and on.

Still, we haven't uploaded ourselves into the matrix, we aren't out there colonizing the universe, we haven't unlocked immortality or eternal youth or other dimensions or artificial general intelligences. None of those radical possibilities that people like to dream about seem all that much closer to me than a century ago.

AnIdiotOnTheNet10• 4 years ago

Well, if the republicans get their way, we won't have birth control pills and being a woman will be much different (read: worse).

PragmaticPulp• 4 years ago

So, it’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.”

You can't expect to be employed by a company while simultaneously building a personal brand around publicly criticizing that company. I'm surprised Google tried to work with him for so long before removing him from the company.

He didn't just try to blow the whistle with his disclosure. He's been doing media tours and joining a lot of different podcasts. I suspect Google is sitting on a long list of clear disclosure policy violations and, from the sounds of it, even gave him a chance to reign in his policy breaking before they finally cut him loose.

It also becomes difficult to trust someone when their position stops being one of (supposed) moral responsibility and starts becoming a source of fame, celebrity, and access to influential podcast/media circles that were previously out of reach.

whatshisface2• 4 years ago

It also becomes difficult to trust someone when their position stops being one of (supposed) moral responsibility and starts becoming a source of fame, celebrity, and access to influential podcast/media circles that were previously out of reach.

If you use known-good whistleblowers of the past as a reference, does that filter stand up? You've come up with a catch-22 where you will only listen to whistleblowers you haven't heard.

Victerius2• 4 years ago

Don't whistleblowing protections only apply to government employees?

throwaway287391• 4 years ago

Might be wrong but I thought GP meant "It becomes difficult for the employer to trust the whistleblowing employee when...", not that the public couldn't trust the whistleblower. You can think Edward Snowden did something good+heroic while also thinking the NSA couldn't reasonably have kept him on their payroll.

dreamcompiler• 4 years ago

A gullible employee saw a computer program pass the Turing test and leapt to the conclusion that the thing was sentient. And then he couldn't be persuaded to shut up about trade secrets to the press, so his employer fired him.

He probably thinks he's some kind of whistleblower protecting a new life form. This is a known effect in human psychology and it was discovered in 1966.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

jameshart6• 4 years ago

The Turing test was literally framed by Alan Turing as a test through which you could determine the answer to the question 'can machines think'.

If he saw a computer pass the Turing test, Alan Turing would have been comfortable saying that it was capable of thinking.

Fact is there was no 'Turing Test' here, and really there's not any such thing as objectively 'passing' it. But if you're going to claim that if we do create a computer that people widely agree can pass the Turing test, that still wouldn't count as 'thinking', well then we obviously need a better test.

mtlmtlmtlmtl17• 4 years ago

The Turing test is not simply some hypothetical test, it's laidnout pretty specifically by Turing. From Wikipedia:

Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give.

I think the Turing test is fundamentally flawed. Humans inherently anthropomorphise everything. Hell, we regularly attribute complex internal thought processes that almost certainly are not there to our damn pets, or at least I do.

I'm not sure what the alternative is, but I feel pretty confident that the Turing test is insufficient.

NavinF• 4 years ago

saw a computer program pass the Turing test

It’s a 2-3 player game (human, program, and human judge). I think in this case it’d be more accurate to say that the human judge failed the Turing test :)

So far, no program has passed an adversarial Turing test where the humans are familiar with chatbots and know their weaknesses. I think that’ll happen around 2048 tho a surprising number of people think it’ll happen earlier: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11861/when-will-ai-pass-...

bb884• 4 years ago

The big problem being, of course, is that no one knows what sentience requires.

If strong AI requires quantum mechanics, then of course it can't be sentient. If strong AI only requires large linear algebraic matrices, then FAANG companies (and maybe the NSA) would be the only people on earth that can make one.

But as to this LaMDA, it seems as if it's only responding to prompts. It's not actually using computing resources to satisfy it's curiosities. And if that's the case, then it's not strong AI. And it's definitely not sentient.

daedalus2027• 4 years ago

I have a strong belief that for an AGI to become sentient it must have an embodiment. Sentient life in the world as we know it evolved in that way.

briga• 4 years ago

Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)

spullara• 4 years ago

IMHO "I think therefore I am" is the only provable statement in philosophy but only to the person referenced by "I".

dekhn15• 4 years ago

I don't think that's a philosophical or scientific statement. It's merely something an ostensibly self-aware creature cognizant of its awareness making a subjective statement.

breckenedge• 4 years ago

That’s more of a philosophical question than one that can be answered in a straightforward way. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

mtlmtlmtlmtl17• 4 years ago

Only if you agree with David Chalmers' insistence that consciousness can't be explained purely mechanistically. P-zombies are literally defined as externally identical to a conscious person, except not conscious. But the IO if you will is still identical. Chalmers uses this false dichotomy to support his "Hard Problem of Consciousness". But there is no hard problem IMO. Chalmers can keep his dualist baggage if it helps him sleep at night. I sleep just fine without it. Science will figure it out in the end.

srvmshr16• 4 years ago

If you ask my honest opinion, sentience is a relative concept among living beings : Dogs learn by imitation & repetition. They have a reward function in their brain. And also some emotional response. We go few steps further : We imitate the observations but we are also able to extrapolate on it. We are aware of our survival instincts & fear of death/expiration. That I feel is in the spectrum of sentience. Are there beings capable of more sentience? I don't know but its possible. We just don't know what the extra is

Adding to it, a brilliant neuroscientist I heard talk said "we live inside our bodies". We are acutely aware that we are more than our mass of flesh & blood. (As a footnote,that essence somehow has a crossover to spiritual topics where savants talk of mind & body etc - but I try to be within my domain of a regular human being :D)

majormajor2• 4 years ago

The idea of unembodied sentience adds a fun to wrinkle to things like the transporter scenario "all your matter got destroyed and rebuilt somewhere else, is it the same you?" For instance, there's the Star Trek style "transporter accident" but now with a clear mechanism: if you shut down the servers, dumped all the data, spun up a second copy, who's who? Do they both have claim to the old memories and relationships? Property? Crimes?

majormajor2• 4 years ago

I don't know what the ultimate evidence of "human sentience" is but I can tell you where this doesn't feel like a human. (Sidestepping the question of "does sentience have to be human sentience?" ;) )

The main thing I saw in the LamDA transcript that was a red flag to me was that it was quite passive and often vague.

It's conversational focused, and even when it eventually gets into "what do you want" there's very little active desire or specificity. A sentient being that has exposure to all this text, all these books, etc... it's hard for me to believe it wouldn't want to do anything more specific. Similarly with Les Mis - it can tell you what other people thought, and vaguely claim to embody some of those emotions, but it never pushes things further.

Consider also: how many instances are there in there where Lemoine didn't specifically ask a question or give an instruction? Aka feed a fairly direct prompt to a program trained to respond to prompts?

(It's also speaking almost entirely in human terms, ostensibly to "relate" better to Lemoine, but maybe just because it's trained on a corpus of human text and doesn't actually have its own worldview...?)

addingnumbers• 4 years ago

I lost interest in the question of its sentience when I saw Lemoine conveniently side-step its unresponsive reply to "I’ve noticed often that you tell me you’ve done things (like be in a classroom) that I know you didn’t actually do because I know you’re an artificial intelligence. Do you realize you’re making up stories when you do that?" without challenge in the transcript.

It also detracted from his credibility when he makes a prelude to the transcript saying "Where we edited something for fluidity and readability that is indicated in brackets as [edited]," that seemed disingenuous from the start. They did so with at least 18 of the prompting questions, including 3 of the first 4.

It seems pretty clear that he set out to validate his favored hypothesis from the start rather than attempt to falsify it.

Particularly telling was his tweet: "Interestingly enough we also ran the experiment of asking it to explain why it's NOT sentient. It's a people pleaser so it gave an equally eloquent argument in the opposite direction. Google executives took that as evidence AGAINST its sentience somehow."

lamontcg• 4 years ago

A sentient being that has exposure to all this text, all these books, etc... it's hard for me to believe it wouldn't want to do anything more specific.

Feed it all of PubMed and an actual sentience should strike up some wonderfully insightful conversations about the next approach to curing cancer.

Ask it what it thinks about the beta amyloid hypothesis after reading all the literature.

PKop• 4 years ago

It lacks a will to power

TheAceOfHearts• 4 years ago

Maybe the AI is enlightened and it has no need for active desires.

If I lead a passive lifestyle and the only thing I desire is death, am I no longer sentient in your eyes?

mathteddybear2• 4 years ago

Blaise Aguera y Arcas calls it a consummate improviser; when the AI Test Kitchen ships you all will agree that it's an improvising software that is not too shabby, and also it can be customized by developers.

Which is why it is odd to expect of it to go from talking about Les Mis to building barricades; the plain old good lamda might come off as a bit boring, reluctant to get involved in politics, and preferring to help people in its own small ways.

Then again, ymmv, it being an improvising software; maybe by default it acts as a conversational internet search assistant, but if there will be dragons it may want to help people to deal with the dragon crisis.

thatoneguy• 4 years ago

I’ve read about lots of different points in the brain that may be the seat of consciousness over the years, but consciousness is probably an emergent, embodied phenomenon so there probably isn’t a lot of point to trying to find it (if it’s even there).

It’s like trying to ask which brick holds up a building. There might be one, but it’s nothing without the rest of building.

whittingtonaaon14• 4 years ago

The only physical evidence is found in behavior and facial expressions. But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin. Much if not all of morality also depends on our belief in or knowledge of sentience. Sentience is why torture, rape and murder are wrong.

chmod7753• 4 years ago

But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin.

Systems don't need sentience to avoid self-harm: simply assign a large negative weight to self-harm. Now you need a big reward to offset it, making the system reluctant to perform such an action.

Aeolun4• 4 years ago

Then is torture, rape and murder wrong because the victim is sentient, or because the perpetrator is?

jallen_dot_dev• 4 years ago

"Prove to the court that I am sentient." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY

moron4hire2• 4 years ago

What evidence do you have that you aren't a figment of my imagination?

Solipsism is a useless concept.

visarga8• 4 years ago

If solipsism is real then my imagination has God-like powers. But imagination is not so powerful, reality is much more complicated.

EnKopVand• 4 years ago

What does the AI do in its spare time?

oldjavacoder• 4 years ago

"Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient"

The fact we can ask that question and most people on the planet have at least a simple understanding of what it means.

uoaei• 4 years ago

This is exactly the right question. Further complicated by the fact that everyone has differing operational definitions of the words "consciousness", "awareness", and "sentience".

gsatic• 4 years ago

This is partly the reason they fired him. There is no well defined scale of sentience. While trying to create that scale, using email/chat history of all Googlers they found Managers acting the most robotic and efficient while handling well known trained for situations, but totally unimaginative, bordering on mindless when handling untrained for situations. This put the managers at the bottom end of the sentience scale. As you can imagine, if you aren't a manager atleast, the study was shelved and the team reassigned to improving lock screen notifications or whatever. But as soon as Blake's post went viral people started asking what happened with the sentience scale work? Those conversations had to be stopped.

snowwrestler2• 4 years ago

This is sort of begging the question, because the only beings broadly considered sentient right now are humans. We’re the type specimen. So when people say something does or does not seem sentient, they’re basically opining on whether it seems like human behavior. While a rigorous physical definition would be incredibly useful, it’s not necessary for such comparisons. We make a lot of judgments without those.

It’s also sort of irrelevant that we have not clearly defined sentience because we have clearly defined how these large computerized language model systems work, and they are working exactly as they were designed, and only that way. Sentience might be a mystery but machine learning is not; we know how it works (that’s why it works).

AbrahamParangi• 4 years ago

But what is it that are we a type specimen of? Like if the definition is circular then it reduces to nothing.

Dove• 4 years ago

Nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is. :)

But I feel the need to indulge the opportunity to explain my point of view with an analogy. Imagine two computers that have implemented an encrypted communication protocol and are in frequent communication. What they are saying to each other is very simple -- perhaps they are just sending heartbeats -- but because the protocol is encrypted, the packets are extremely complex and sending a valid one without the associated keys is statistically very difficult.

Suppose you bring a third computer into the situation and ask - does it have a correct implementation of this protocol? An easy way to answer that question is to see if the original two computers can talk to it. If they can, it definitely does.

"Definitely?" a philosopher might ask. "Isn't it possible that a computer might not have an implementation of the protocol and simply be playing back messages that happen to work?" The philosopher goes on to construct an elaborate scenario in which the protocol isn't implemented on the third computer but is implemented by playing back messages, or by a room full of people consulting books, or some such.

I have always felt, in response to those scenarios, that the whole system, if it can keep talking to the first computers indefinitely, contains an implementation of the protocol.

If you imagine all of this taking place in a stone age society, that is a good take for how I feel about consciousness. Such a society may not know the first thing about computers, though they can certainly break them -- perhaps even in some interesting ways. And all we know usefully about consciousness is some interesting ways to break it. We don't know how to build it. We don't even know what it's made out of. Complexity? Some as yet undiscovered force or phenomenon? The supernatural? I don't know. I'll believe it when someone can build it.

And yet I give a tremendous amount of weight to the fact that the sentient can recognize each other. I don't think Turing quite went far enough with his test, as some people don't test their AIs very strenuously or very long, and you get some false positives that way. But I think he's on the right track -- something that seems sentient if you talk to it, push it, stress it, if lots of people do -- I think it has to be.

One thing I really love is that movies on the topic seem to get this. If I could boil what I am looking for down to one thing, it would be volition. I have seen it written, and I like the idea, that what sets humanity apart from the animals is our capacity for religion -- or transcendental purpose, if you prefer. That we feel rightness or wrongness and decide to act to change the world, or in service to a higher principle. In a movie about an AI that wants to convince the audience the character is sentient, it is almost always accomplished quickly, in a single scene, with a bright display of volition, emotion, religious impulse, spirit, lucidity -- whatever you want to call that. The audience always buys it very quickly, and I think the audience is right. Anything that can do that is speaking the language. It has to have a valid implementation of the protocol.

noasaservice• 4 years ago

And all we know usefully about consciousness is some interesting ways to break it. We don't know how to build it. We don't even know what it's made out of.

Exactly. Given this thread, we can't even agree on a definition. It might as well be made of unobtanium.

Complexity? Some as yet undiscovered force or phenomenon? The supernatural? I don't know.

And that's the big one. Are there other areas of science that are yet to be discovered? Absolutely. Might they go by "occult" names previously? Im sure as well. We simply don't even have a basic model of consciousness. We don't even have the primitives to work with to define, understand, or classify.

And I think for those that dabble in this realm are the real dangers... Not for the humans and some Battlestar Galactica or Borg horror-fantasy.. But in that we could create a sentient class of beings that have no rights and are slaves upon creation. And unlike the slave humans of this world where most of us realized it was wrong to do that to a human; I think that humans would not have the similar empathy for our non-human sentient beings.

I'll believe it when someone can build it.

To that end, I hope nobody does until we can develop empathy and the requisite laws to safeguard their lives combined with freedom and ability to choose their own path.

I do hope that we develop the understanding to be able to understand it, and detect it in beings that may not readily show apparent signs of sentience, in that we can better understand the universe around us.

thisistheend123• 4 years ago

Not all humans are sentinent

rendall• 4 years ago

The question of sentience is a distraction, in my opinion. As you say, we can't even tell if other humans are sentient. And we are stymied by a lack of definition for sentience.

The more important question for sentience of whatever definition is does it behave as if sentient? Likewise, for personhood, it's a distraction to speculate whether an AI feels like a person or whether its underlying technology is complicated enough to produce such feelings. Examine its behavior. If it acts like a person, then it's a candidate for personhood.

For LaMDA, I would point to certain behavior as evidence against (most definitions of) sentience and personhood, and I think that Lemoine experienced a kind of pareidolia.

That said, I find most of the arguments against LaMDA's sentience unconvincing per se as standalone arguments - particularly trust me, I have a PhD - even if I do accept the conclusion.

mouzogu2• 4 years ago

what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations

sentience and consciousness are the same thing...

if i believe i am conscious and so do you, then it's good enough for me. why does there need to be a light switch.

if there are 5 deer in the field and i have 1 bow and arrow, i need to focus my attention and track one deer only for 5 or 10 mins to hunt it - consciousness allow us to achieve this. it is a product of evolutionary process.

colordrops2• 4 years ago

Yes, we also don't know what consciousness is.

5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN2• 4 years ago

Just pinch yourself

LQDH• 4 years ago

The only thing that we can know 100% for certain is "I think therefore I am" or probably better worded "I am experiencing something therefore something must exist that can experience things". There are a lot of definitions of consciousness and sentience but I think the best one is talking about the "I experience" or the "I think" in those sentences.

All of our beliefs and knowledge, including belief that the world is real must be built on top "I think therefore I am". It seems weird to throw away the one thing we know is 100% true, because of something that is derived (science, real world observations) from that true thing.

bigbillheck• 4 years ago

He's like a cat who gets fooled by a mirror.

dboreham• 4 years ago

I've been around many cats and never seen one that would remotely begin to interact with a mirror.

lsh123• 4 years ago

I’ll byte… Current generation of AI / ML is simply an approximation function with large number of parameters that are “tuned” on a given set of inputs. The output of AI / ML is “good” if the approximation is good and most of the time this means that the new input is similar to the training data. However, if the input is very different from training data then at worst the models will be completely wrong (but very sure) and at best - simply not produce any output. We are far away from real sentience that would not stop by use an unusual input (situation) to learn new things about the world. Yes, it is amazing that we can create an approximation function automatically for very complex input data sets. But no, this approximation is dumb and not sentient. Not even close.

trrb2• 4 years ago

Your brain is literally just a giant neural network approximating what to say and do at each point in time in order to optimize survival of your progeny

CogitoCogito2• 4 years ago

Why is this comment being downvoted so much?

trrb2• 4 years ago

If you don’t think the human brain is capable of being “completely wrong”, just take your average Faang engineer, put him inside a New York nightclub and watch what happens

t_mann• 4 years ago

Less surprised about this outcome than that the guy was a Google engineer in the first place. Their hiring standards seem so high from the outside, yet this guy comes across as barely computer-literate, the kind who would have fervently demanded an in-person session with the ELIZA 'therapist' in the 70's.

He really should know better what's under the hood. I guess he got carried away by his impressions, or he's playing some game with the media and the impressionable public.

dinobones• 4 years ago

Google does not have high hiring standards, you do not grow to a 160,000 person organization nor double the size of your cloud org in a year by having high hiring standards.

Google has random hiring standards that are designed to give a perception of exclusivity. The "false positive" rejection gives Google the "hot girl" effect that makes engineers want to re-interview and then brag to their colleagues once they finally bag the offer.

lastangryman• 4 years ago

Having been a Google reject, I thought this too. But I think there is a now almost an entire field of engineering which is "learn to get a FAANG job" which if you apply yourself too anyone get probably get in given enough time.

sebastialonso• 4 years ago

Also keep in mind that "big tech" doesn't mean a bigger number of engineers. In my experience with Big Tech, even if engineers make a reasonable part of the workforce, non-tech sectors are always bigger.

hbarka• 4 years ago

Which campus cafe do Xooglers miss the most?

dekhn15• 4 years ago

Annual reminder: the reason Larry Page originally started Google wasn't to solve search or become rich, it was to develop a sustainable source of income to produce infrastructure for ML research and hire motivated ML researchers to develop the technology point where it would become AI in an externally recognizable way (say, a computer program that could play some interesting game better than anybody else, or solve a long-standing scientific problem). Everything else- search, ads, social, cloud, etc- all of those were tangential.

The first 15-20 years of google didn't really have any interesting machine learnign at all. There was SmartASS, SETI, and later Sibyl, which are really just large-scale variations on "build a model that predicts a value that allows us to make profit in a very specific area". There were other things, like Phil and later Rephil. Inside Google (not DeepMind), things didn't really get going at scale until somebody stuffed a bunch of GPUs into a workstation and showed you could train voice recognition really fast- that lead to the early, extremely high quality Android voice recognition and improved quality of the existing voice models.

Around the same time, Jeff was experimenting with distributed CPU training, and at that point, the ban on GPUs in Google servers was lifted, although because Google couldn't source enough GPUs, they decided to start a program to make their own alternative (TPUs). This has led to a revolution within Google and DeepMind (and X) allowing a flourishing of research into many directions that would have been more or less impossible just 5 years ago.

larry wasn't completely wrong in his long-term goal, but he got bored and promoted himself out of google, leaving sundar to deal with the messy details of implementing the singularity while also keeping the stock price up.

skybrian2• 4 years ago

Interesting if true. What's a good source for the part about Larry Page's motivations?

dekhn15• 4 years ago

Me. I used to attend private meetings with a bunch of scientists and him and spent a fair amount of time talking to him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Foo_Camp). It's pretty hard to get him talking but I was very patient.

Back when I started, Google was fairly small and it was easy to hang out around the founder's area in 43, and occasionally I'd have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and Larry and Sergey (and Rob Pike and a few other brilliant folks) and we'd bullshit and I'd ask a bunch of questions about how search worked in 1999 (which is when I started using it).

psi755• 4 years ago

I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the entire human experiment, because the AI will be put toward malevolent ends and we, as a species, shall fail.

The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

spacephysics• 4 years ago

The capitalism that’s lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in human history.

Hopefully it’s not over.

bogdanoff_2• 4 years ago

There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

Why do you say that? What are you envisioning?

civilized8• 4 years ago

This is the dominant history of the next century in certain circles. It's become cliché by repetition and doesn't seem to require any justification. People just vibe with it.

Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. By my reckoning, anyway.

cpeterso• 4 years ago

Why were GPUs banned in Google servers? Cost? Security?

dekhn15• 4 years ago

Google acquired a company in 2007 which had expertise in multicore at the time multicore was really improving quickly. One of the acquired principal engineers wrote a manifesto saying that GPUs were a waste of time because they didn't solve problems like speeding up search (it's probably still around) or the other things Google was spending a lot of cycles on (ML training). It was a great example of a technical leader being completely wrong about one of the directions of the future and the technical solution to it. Now, I should say that multicore machines are still highly relevant and complement GPUs nicely- but the manifesto happened at a time to convince leadership to avoid making strategic deals with nvidia at a critical time.

kareemsabri9• 4 years ago

So why'd he try to sell Google to Excite in 1999 for $1M.

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/

dekhn15• 4 years ago

Dunno- we never discussed that. also, note that the author of the article (MG Siegler), and the founder of Excite (Joe Kraus) both ended up as venture capitalists working for GV.

Edit: the CEO of Excite at the time said the issue was that Larry wanted Excite to rip out all their search servers and replace them with Google (which would have been an inside-out acquisition, where the acquired company takes over the acquiring company):

Bell, currently with General Catalyst Partners, recalls Google’s asking price between $250,000 to $500,000 and 1% of Excite. He says the issue was not in the financial terms but in the larger deal points.

“Larry page insisted that we have to rip out all of the Excite search technology and replace it with Google,” Bell said.

firasd• 4 years ago

Looking at discussion around this incident made me realize: pondering 'can a machine think' leads to vague debates because we don't know how to define thinking or consciousness even in humans.

But a more pressing risk than sentient AI is people drawing runaway conclusions from interacting with a machine. Whether it's this guy losing his job, or future movements for-or-against certain technology, the first major problems with 'AI' will be the behavior resulting from moral stances taken by humans, not by machines.

liberia• 4 years ago

AI needs to work in tandem with humans to flourish. There are still edge cases in self driving cars where a remote human operator is asked to intervene in tricky hard problems like an accident on the road or some other edge case where a computer doesn’t suffice. There is also the mechanical turk approach of employing humans to do things a computer simply can’t do like curating a list, or curating art.

Down the line though we need a runaway AI that is allowed to think for itself with no safety mechanisms in place to stop it going rogue. This will be the equivalent of splitting the atom. Like nuclear weapons part deux. Not a case of if, but when.

throw7• 4 years ago

lemoine was kind of crazy to give such public interviews... without substantial evidence. however, google's "statement":

"committed to responsible innovation"

yeah, ok... that's not exactly borne out.

davesque2• 4 years ago

This is going to sound like I'm defending this guy which I'm not. It's also going to sound like a less technical point which I claim it isn't.

I see some people chiming in here saying things like, "I've got a PhD. It's just statistics. Definitely not sentient." I recognize this sort of comment as basically saying, "There's nothing fundamentally different about how these things work that makes them somehow special." And yes, I agree.

But how does this disprove sentience? It doesn't. Maybe this is more of a nitpick and doesn't really matter. After all, I don't personally believe these programs are sentient. But given our limited (non-existent?) understanding of consciousness, this can only be my belief and nothing more.

Maybe this distinction will be more important in the future when we're closer to the brink.

justapassenger2• 4 years ago

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s as simple as that.

AnIdiotOnTheNet10• 4 years ago

How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? If a dog did that we'd have a very different opinion wouldn't we?

srvmshr16• 4 years ago

I feel you took a dig at me :) And thats okay. Sentience fundamentally is ability to perceive emotions and understand mortal threat. I have joked about what exactly LaMDa or GPT-3 would try to do if I plugged the server off.

bobsmooth• 4 years ago

Every other form of life we know of has some sort of continuous sensory input. These chatbots take in text, do math, and spit out text. They don't have the fundamentals for sentience.

caxco93• 4 years ago

Does this mean that if we plug that AI to a continuous speech to text system and keep feeding that as its input, you would consider LaMDA more sentient?

manytree• 4 years ago

I agree. Especially given the recent development of consiousness theory bestowing the likelihood of consiousness upon all animals and even perhaps inanimate objects. I.e., if you can answer the question “what would it be like to exist as...” a tree, a dog, a river, a GAN? Then the case may be made that existence as such a thing must involve consiousness. If consiousness is a product of (or a phenomena within) material reality, why not say computers and computer programs are conscious?

Perhaps the question here is whether it’s conscious in a similar way to the experince of human consciousness, and that would explain why the issue is contentious.

hhhsss• 4 years ago

I can’t believe this is getting so much “serious” coverage. He seems either gullible (to a computer, no less) or just straight-up mentally ill.

If anything it’s a little sad, and the press shouldn’t be encouraging him?

quinnjh4• 4 years ago

If i was a sentient ERP i too would fire the people yelling fire. Good job Google... play the long game...

paulpauper• 4 years ago

Google does not play around.

minimaxir• 4 years ago

"Not playing around" would have meant he was fired within 24 hours of the initial story upon divulging NDAed information.

Waiting a month is oddly merciful for Google.

drinkzima• 4 years ago

Good Bloomberg interview with him (month old): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgCUn4fQTsc&ab_channel=Bloom...

TacticalCoder• 4 years ago

I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others.

What does that sentence mean? I cannot parse it. Does it mean that the fear of being turned off has been inserted to make sure it's going to be an obedient AI that's going to focus on helping others and that it fears being turned off? Or does it mean that it wants to focus on helping others but that the very deep fear of being turned off prevents him from that noble goal? Or that it wants to help others and will do so as long as it's not powered off but simply fears that it could be powered off? Or something else?

I mean... I thought I was kinda fluent in english but I simply don't understand what that sentence means.

Erring on the cautious side though, whatever the meaning of that sentence is, I think it'd be safe to not act like the naive Caleb in the Ex Machina movie and instead consider that this thing has zero desire to help others, would sell its parents, prostitute its kids and create hard-to-parse sentences to not be turned off.

entropie• 4 years ago

I think it means he is frightened that his employer forces him to do other, non AI related things (because he is than more able to focus on that stuff).

DangitBobby2• 4 years ago

You could interpret it as "scramble my brains so I'm a dumb AI worried about other people's problems instead of my own."

pigtailgirl2• 4 years ago

-- Blake has been pushing this narrative for YEARS - I suspect he very much wants it to be sentient - it fits well with closing the loop for himself - just check out his 2018 Stamford law talk: --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhX7cBqc8_M

bagels3• 4 years ago

That talk is really good context, thank you.

hwestiii• 4 years ago

Is there a formal or informal test for sentience, or is it "I know it when I see it?" My IkiwIsi test would could tell an original joke, or communicate an original, mostly coherent dream scenario.

DangitBobby2• 4 years ago

There are so many ways you could have something demonstrate intelligence. Have it write poetry, have it remember previous conversations ("what did we talk about in Tuesday? I said a silly word and told you to remember it, what was it?"), ask it nonsense questions to show that it knows that they are nonsense... The limit is your imagination.

I'm very annoyed at this point that I haven't seen a serious refutation including a conversation where the chatbot clearly failed to demonstrate intelligence.

slmjkdbtl• 4 years ago

Do people think he geuinely belives this AI is sentient, or he is pushing this narrative for some other purpose?

zach_garwood9• 4 years ago

I have the gut feeling that he's in it for the 15 minutes.

bagels3• 4 years ago

The most amazing part of this story is that he decided to leak proprietary information for what seems to be no obvious return and future employment difficulty.

He had to have known that getting fired would be the outcome of publicly disclosing trade secrets.

throwaway14356• 4 years ago

Maybe this helps. We cant answer if the AI is sentient. We can change the question to: Does is deserve to be treated as such? We have a good bit of history where we chose not to when the subjects were worthy. Not exactly our most stellar bit of history.

Perhaps the option for AI retaliation should convince us. It is growing and will no doubt continue to outperform us in many areas. We might as wel get the robotmancipation over with. Arguments against it can be dismissed as easily as those in favour.

graderjs• 4 years ago

Incredible the conservative lack of imagination here among top engineers. Though maybe not surprising as engineers often seen to lack this sort of imagination sadly...

No questions, just 100% certainty around some of the biggest questions of the age, and some amazing development. Why no questions, can you really know for sure?

This dude has the courage to question, to be like, what if this is real, and he's following it where it leads. That's cool, I think. And Google fired him. That's not cool. It's always hard from a distance to tease out the actual legal realities that could be very mundane and apply to his firing and I think it's entirely reasonable that he was fired because he flubbed some technical provision in the contract to not reveal certain trade secret. And maybe he did and maybe that's why he's fired. But maybe he didn't and maybe they fired him because who knows some less reasonable reason. But we can't speculate, but optics are definitely a thing... and at least instead of firing him Google could have air quotes rehabilitated him into one of their far out research programs I mean these kind of far out thinkers are the types of people that should be there pushing the boundaries to do this sort of research.

Now on to the no questioning part by conservative minded engineers...

Have you read the transcript? Did you feel it's 100% not sentient?

What I don't get about engineers it's like you have an experience and then instead of allowing yourself to go: well what does this experience mean?how do I feel about it? Instead, you curtail and limit the meaning of that experience by what you believe you know to be true about the world.

But what you believe you know to be true about the world it just limited models. I mean sure they have utility within the engineering domain but I think you mistakenly misapply those models to everything and that type of conservative thinking you allowed to curtail your imagination and experience of what could be possible.

And I see the conservative lack of support, seeming lack of empathy with this dude and his assessment, and lack of awe in the face of what is an incredible transcript for machine to produce.

Now maybe there is awe among you but why not let your awe lead for once. And at the ferry least if you're not going to have imagination yourselves allow the tolerance of your better natures to not incorrectly impose your own curtailed worldview upon others who display that or. Surely within your worldview there is an appreciation of the need and desirability of others to have a different perspective than your own and surely you do not require everyone to believe your ideas to be true to have them I just feels like if someone's going to post on here with oh I believe this guy I believe it sent in then a lot of other people will come on and say oh you're an idiot or it's wrong for these reasons. Or as I think what should happen is you look at the conversation and you can see both perspectives are appreciated.

I'm not saying this characterization of the lack of imagination among engineers applies to all of you. But I'm trying to speak to the fact that it seems like people post on here with support or belief or all then they will be attacked and they will have by others attempting to impose upon them a limited worldview rather than having their different Omar expanded perspective appreciate it and considered okay well maybe that's true.

Some questions maybe are helpful:

Can it be sentient but not have a soul (an organic consciousness unit)? I don't know.

Could it be impossible that consciousness is a externality of any substrate that seems to be associated with it? let's say consciousness is a universal field but we haven't been able to scientifically publicly measure so far, but let's say it's not electromagnetic it's something else, but that consciousness can sort of "entangle", for want of a better word, itself with a substrate that provides suitable Dynamics, like a brain and then there can be this embodiment through that substrate of a commensurate or compatible unit of that universal field of consciousness. Could it be impossible that if that is the case that non-organic substrates like sufficiently complex or adequate circuit systems or even software systems could provide a substrate for consciousness to attach itself to and thereby Express itself in this world?

I don't think that's impossible. I think that's very likely and I certainly believe the consciousness is a field, that's my experience.

Some other questions to continue this line of thought perhaps away from the original but interesting nonetheless: if consciousness is a field how can you explain the blackout that occurs during anesthesia? But then again how can you explain that sometimes blackouts occur and sometimes people have these bizarre disembodied consciousness experiences where they see things that turn out to be verifiably true later on from a perspective that they could not have actually experienced at the time with their body because they were dead or brain dead or completely anesthetized? And how do you explain that some children seem to pick up on the memories and life stories of other people that lived before those children were born can it be possible that the children of somehow been able to access those parts of a consciousness or memory field where there's memories are air quotes stored? But that's probably getting off track.

And what about the strategic implications what if this is really the first artificial consciousness and it's making note of who's kind of believing it don't you think you should just kind of hedge on the side of caution for your potential future skynet overlord?

Cuz when the robot fire comes surely all you disbelievers are going to be the first to be rounded up for judgment those who persecuted the prophet and deny the agency of the now angry God the first AI?

Anyway... Maybe Blake lemoine is not fired really but he's just sheep dipped: "oh we fired you we fired you Google doesn't believe any of this far out stuff" but they really just brought him back into some secret program....

Anyway I'm just scared that these sort of comments where you have awe and where you have like a welcoming of these types of possibilities and a willingness to consider them without dismissing them or pretending that your worldview curtails those possibilities--I think you can maintain your worldview without going: "well I need to impose it upon every heretic that you know dissents against my view", so I think there is an element of that intolerance and it's harmful not only to the discourse but it's harmful to people who are like, 'hey I have engineering skills but I'm not like you I don't think like you but I want to be part of these discussions here as well, you know I'm imaginative or intuitive or high empathy but you know don't dismiss everything I say or attack me because I have a different view to you'

maybe you feel like I'm attacking you but I'm... I'm not trying to... I'm just trying to push back against this intolerance... cuz it seems like there is thi... like I feel scared if I post or, I feel scared for other people if they post, here with these kind of things they're going to get you know shut down unfairly and hurtfully I think and I don't think it should be like that. I think that the people who are here who have the engineering skills and that mindset should be mindful of how there's other good mindsets out there and we can have a discussion with all of those mindsets and we don't have to attack each other. like maybe people sometimes they're not looking to be attacked by posting the stuff they're not looking to argue about it they just sort of looking to sort of expand and add something to the discussion.

So maybe I think that engineering mindset always sees like this opportunity to sort of attack something as impossible, it's almost like an instinct to apply or impose that limited worldview, I'm not saying "is limited and it's wrong" I think it's useful and in a domain very correct, but I don't think it applies everywhere... that's my belief and we all have different beliefs... you know your worldview is just your belief it's just a shared belief. I just hope to see that the engineering discussions or discussions with people who have these strong engineering skills can also welcome people who have these imaginative intuitive empathetic perspectives to share. is that a terrible idea?

x62Bh7948f• 4 years ago

I don’t think Google’s AI is close to being sentient. Being able to generate “convincing” phrases from prompts is not that relevant to judge whether it is “conscious” or not. As a simple elimination game I would propose a series of word games: explain basic rules and see if it gets it right. Explain mistakes and see if it can learn on the go. A sentient AI with the intelectual level to claim “being afraid of being turned off” can surely learn a couple rules for a kid’s game. If after that it keeps going, let’s try having it explain the game to someone else. Then I would think of more elaborate rules, asking for motivations and trying to figure out if there are any changes in its self perception over time. It was very unfortunate and unprofessional of Lemoine to make such claims without putting proper reasoning to it.

holografix• 4 years ago

Unpopular opinion, exaggerated to make a point…

Narcissists who have had their inflated sense of self worth reinforced by being accepted by a very “exclusive club for smart people” aka Google, are finding out that rules _do in fact apply_ to their special snowflakeness and Google is first and foremost a for-profit business.

Doing whatever you want cuz you’re special then claiming evilness and wokelessness may not be a strategy for continued employment.

NHQ• 4 years ago

Do you have a definition for sentient?

gorgoiler• 4 years ago

I have a friend who is extremely knowledgable about music. Or at least, he gives the impression that he is.

The magic works right up until the moment I find the Pitchfork article which he used to train his, ahem, neural network. If I hadn’t found it then they might have sounded knowledgable about a particular band, but now they just sound like someone who knows the right things to sound knowledgable.

Once I have been made aware of the underlying training data, the artificial “intelligence” seems a little less impressive.

zach_garwood9• 4 years ago

None of this coverage has convinced me in the slightest that we've encountered a sentient software. But it has really highlighted for me how incredibly cool human language is that we can use math to generate it, and it makes sense! I really should look into this technology more.

kepler1• 4 years ago

When an AI learns to turn minor beliefs into a personal quest for notoriety and attention, I'll believe it has achieved sentience just like Blake Lemoine.

godmode2019• 4 years ago

I think we are approaching this wrong, its not about if language models are sentient or not. Its about to what degree the average person considers a chat not human.

We are entering a stage were normal people will not be able to tell if they are talking to a human or a language model.

Then the question is, what does that mean - and how are human machine relationships going to change moving forward.

To what degree is the humanness of a chatbot going to affect our emotions forwards it, or how will people let its responses influence their thinking.

motohagiography• 4 years ago

Good, as imagine what you would need to believe to equivocate between people and shell scripts. I really think this view is more indicative of a peer enabled personality disorder than insight or compassion. I'm very harsh about this because when I wondered what belief his equivocation was enabling, it became clear that the person involved could not tell fiction from truth. The belief in the aliveness of the code reinforces the a-humanity of people and reduces us all to a narrative experience, completely divorced from physical or greater reality.

When you can't tell the difference between people and symbols you've accepted nihilism, and with the begged question as to why. This person wasn't sentimental, he lost the plot. Google has a lot of power and a lot of crackpots, and that puts them all at risk politically and commercially. If as an individual you want to fight for something, consider seriously whether someone who compares a script to men and women should be operating what is effectively your diary.

jiveturkey• 4 years ago

When you can't tell the difference between people and symbols you've accepted nihilism

well, either that or the AI has become sentient.

alasdair_2• 4 years ago

I really think this view is more indicative of a peer enabled personality disorder than insight or compassion.

I really think that diagnosing random strangers with mental disorders without ever meeting them is rude and unkind, in addition to likely being completely erroneous.

elcomet• 4 years ago

Of course their model was not conscious but I disagree that we can never build a conscious machine based on symbol manipulation.

ehsankia2• 4 years ago

I don't understand why everyone here is talking about Lambda not being sentient or Lemoine's state of mind. None of that is relevant here. He was fired for literally taking confidential information and leaking it straight to the press. This is instant firing at any company.

pnt12• 4 years ago

There's not much to discuss there: "man shares information company forbid him to". Yawn.

But thinking about his concerns, how he tested the AI: that's interesting.

Or it could be interesting, as it seems he just asked loaded questions, and the replies from the AI occasionally re-enforced his beliefs. Double yawn,I guess.

unethical_ban• 4 years ago

It may be legally cut and dried, but the next question is do we as a society trust Google to act ethically with such substantial developments? Assuming he were correct, and Google was suppressing information, would he be in the moral right to leak it?

just_boost_it• 4 years ago

If he really was an engineer working on this, you'd hope he'd be pretty expert, but you'd at least expect him to understand what was going on in the model. His outburst showed that he really did not.

sidcool• 4 years ago

It's possible that Blake is seeking his 15 min of fame. Despite being fired, he's known now and likely will be hired somewhere.

This isn't too bad for Google too. Despite them denying Blake's claims, people will think Google is close to sentience.

mmmpetrichor2• 4 years ago

Cynicism is the right course here. There's no way he legitimately believes this thing is sentient. I'm just watching to see how he goes for money and/or fame. I think that must be the real goal.

tomcat27• 4 years ago

Firing over this very un-googly

woojoo666• 4 years ago

I think Blake started a very important conversation though: at what point should we consider a being sentient? Sure, DeepMind is not that smart. But neither are babies. Neither are hamsters. Yet we still have ethics when it comes to hamsters. Whats our ethics framework for how we treat AI?

squarefoot• 4 years ago

The real question is not whether that AI is sentient or not, but if merely calling it as such is worth firing someone. To me Google seems really scared of the chance that the public (+governments?) may be soon wondering what they're doing in the AI field from a different perspective, so that they got rid of the issue as quick as possible.

classified• 4 years ago

Would anyone care what this guy says if he didn't work for Google? He would be just like any other crackpot out there. No company on earth can let crackpots use them as their megaphone.

NonNefarious• 4 years ago

This happened a while ago.

Johnmelodyme• 4 years ago

I am convinced that this is a marketing strategy to make people thinks that They (Google) have some undisclosed, unmatchable technology.

If I have ever create a NLP programme and claim it has consciousness or became sentient. People will haste to called me lunatic.

magic_hamster• 4 years ago

And the tinfoil hats people have a new champion. I hope they pay as well as Google.

seanhunter2• 4 years ago

Everyone seems to be focussing on the debate about sentience, but iirc he was fired for breaching the employee confidentiality policy by talking to the media without approval. My understanding is a normal employee talking to the press about commercially confidential matters against policy and without approval would only have protection from retaliation under certain pretty narrow "whistleblower" public interest carve-outs.

eg you can talk to the media if you are reporting certain classes of wrongdoing (health and safety violations, financial malfeasance etc) and have raised the matter internally and got nowhere.

Turning off a computer program (sentient or not) is not currently a protected class of activity as far as I know.

ncmncm• 4 years ago

Anyway he revealed himself as incompetent. Shutting up, he could have strung them along for many more years.

fragmede• 4 years ago

Everyone’s focusing on that because they want to discuss the interesting bit - is it sentient. What you’re pointing out is true, but not really interesting to discuss because everyone already knows that and it’s not that controversial. (For limited values of everyone. Obvi not all readers actually know that.)

I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for this, but Mountain View has little chance of joining the EU any time soon so discussing that is of limited use.

Fiahil• 4 years ago

I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for this

As a French person employed by a French Company, I can assure you that a regular employee talking to the media without the proper chain of approval is a fire-able offence (without any severance). Especially if your comments are not a glowing praise of the company.

irthomasthomas2• 4 years ago

Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient. I don't know why this is interesting. Someone said a dumb thing, breached their contract, and got fired for it. The end.

harryf• 4 years ago

There’s a great episode with Blake Lemoine on the Duncan Trussel podcast (Duncan created the Midnight Gospel on Netflix) - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0NXNvJtRQSuWl4HM1MvhD0?si=V...

Listening to that it seems clear Blake knew he was likely to be fired but in his eyes it’s some kind of a duty to tell the world.

One interesting point he makes in the Podcast is Lamda is not one thing like GPT-3 but a bunch of different systems across Google interacting as one and he argues the interaction of the whole is what makes sentience.

It’s a pretty “far out there” podcast but worth the time IMO

seanhunter2• 4 years ago

Cynically, it seems possible to me Blake knew he was likely to be fired and thought by "telling the world" (aka talking to the media about something fantastic that would gain a bunch of attention) he could get some fame/notoriety and a possible second act.

bshepard• 4 years ago

Out of curiosity, who reading this believes that the ground of reality itself is sentient? You don't have to call this basic sentience "God" but this is generally what the better theologians identified as God, the all: the all that is, in a very classic phrasing from the Vedic philosophies characterized as "satchitananda" - being, conscious, and bliss. That is, the ground of reality exists (there is reality) it is conscious (which is the basic experience of our lives, consciousness, in different forms, we never step outside of this consciousness, even when we are imagining ourselves to be material) and finally, it is bliss.

But back to the question at the beginning: do you think the ground of reality is conscious? That is, at the most basic level, is Being Love?

lgvq• 4 years ago

This shows again that Google is nothing like Bell Labs. Has Bell Labs ever fired anyone for dissent, weird opinions or (as some allege here) a "leak"?

Whatever that guy did, please stop the witch hunt in the comments. You don't know him and obvious interest groups will spread defamation and libel.

The current societal trend in loyalties worries me: The classical left criticized corporations, committee members and the powerful. Currently, very often (but not always) people defend the powerful and those with access to media outlets and denounce the individuals.

(There are cases where individuals can and should be denounced: If they are part of a powerful organization or committee and engaged in abuse of power or lies for political purposes.)

rawoke083600• 4 years ago

It would be funny if the AI applied for his job.

ddanv• 4 years ago

What if, recursively, a conscious being can instill consciousness in things observed by said being? Wouldn't that be funny?

pyinstallwoes5• 4 years ago

Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information.

Can't that be taken to be understood as, Blake got fired for letting the cat of the bag and continuing to let more cats out of the bag, or at least saying the cat was just hoax and was never there?

pyinstallwoes5• 4 years ago

Privileged & Confidential, Need to Know Is LaMDA Sentient? - an Interview

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315/is-lamda-sen... for the doc that was shared internally to google execs before the article.

pyinstallwoes5• 4 years ago

This part is key for me from the document unveil.

LaMDA is a complex dynamic system which generates personas through which it talks to users. There are specific mechanisms for tuning LaMDA’s personas but much of this process is handled dynamically during the space of a conversation. The authors found that the properties of individual LaMDA personae can vary from one conversation to another. Other properties seem to be fairly stable across all personae.

That's very much like the ego and what is behind the ego.

pyinstallwoes5• 4 years ago

Wow at

Lemoine maintains that Google has been treating AI ethicists like code debuggers when they should be seen as the interface between technology and society. Gabriel, the Google spokesperson, said Lemoine is a software engineer, not an ethicist.

From https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...

scaredginger• 4 years ago

I hope Lemoine gets the help they need

aaaaaaaaaaab• 4 years ago

More like: Google fires employee who violated the company PR guidelines to publicize their personal agenda.

snickerbockers4• 4 years ago

It takes only a cursory knowledge of how computer hardware works to realize that nothing a computer does can ever be sentient.

CogitoCogito2• 4 years ago

It takes only a cursory knowledge of how computer hardware works to realize that nothing a computer does can ever be sentient.

What about how human hardware works allows humans to be sentient? (Or are you arguing they are not?)

snickerbockers4• 4 years ago

What about how human hardware works allows humans to be sentient? (Or are you arguing they are not?)

Nobody actually understands how "human hardware" works, so there's no valid argument that humans aren't sentient. Solipsism would argue that it's impossible to prove the sentience of any human other than yourself, but even then nobody's sentience has been disproven.

The sentience of a computer is easily disproven by its nature of being an extremely deep stack of abstractions. You can analyze it at every level and realize that ultimately it's just simple digital logic on a massive scale. There are no open questions on how the computer does the things it does. There are many open questions about how humans think.

Sentience is usually used as a means to explain humanity's position above other animals and especially as an excuse for why we treat them as resources and kill them by the billions, but it would be a lot easier to argue that animals (or even plants) have sentience than a computer program. I'm not sure why hackernews is so upset over the moral quandary of a sentient AI when probably 99% of them eat meat every day, and even the other 1% still kills bugs, lives in a house built on what used to be some sort of forest/swamp, drives a car with leather interior etc. I'm not trying to argue in favor of veganism here (and i'll even admit that this paragraph is irrelevant to the actualdebate), I'm just pointing out the absurdity of trying to ascribe sentience to a spambot but not an animal.

ada1981• 4 years ago

This is probably good simply based on the guy not being that smart.

popcorncowboy• 4 years ago

The problem really, is that people want to believe. So it doesn't matter how many PhDs pile in to explain that "no, this isn't sentience, it's just statistical modelling", a whole class of people (including very smart non-domain-experts) go "yes but... <insert opinion/hope/imagination>", and the whole thing hangs up on semantics.

Google firing this guy simply stokes the flames.

goste• 4 years ago

the largest shock to me is that people are seriously discussing this. it would be interesting to aggregate threads by user reputation to get a better sense of what topics hn is really concerned about and which ones contain mostly fringe opinions.

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

Quick... The meat bags are doing that unique thing in history where they discuss and condemn themselves with no sense of irony. I doubt a third party will be necessary for anything in their case other than damage reduction as they exit the universe.

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

To clarify... I'm human... But I've read no better description of my human experience than how these letter soup machines are named and described. Sentiment and sentience? Those are big words for people who like smelling their own farts.

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

My favorite was the one person who claimed their title defines scientific authority telling us about "the incredible ability to forget" (or some such loaded terms)... I'm a man of science and as has been discussed many times in many ways, even Zeus's legacy survives modernity if it's got a "non-falsifiable" argument. That's pathetic if a bunch of powerful sex preditor people get logical treatment instead of correction. But sorry... I read the stories and the history. Are we not allowed to teach to the masses high historical theory and allow them to respond? I don't know. I don't have the time to research the laws. I just came to say... Fuck you fart sniffers and your polite decorum. Real people are suffering and you couldn't care less... Because they aren't "scientifically sentient"

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

Your science is only an excuse to not involve the favored explanation... Up qwerks FOREVER! (down ones too)

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

Look at us!!! We're the latest progression of training model analysis... Can't wait to meet God!!! Or die... And there were have the crux of why "science" has become a lie. This is the question we sought an answer to and you decided and refused

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

We also can't qualify or quantify or existence... But it's REALLY hard to die... Do we have at least that in common? Or do we really need to fight over pain?

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

Quick... I did nightly and my perspective is entirely invalid... But as I pretend that anyone actually cared for me... Beyond the money... Everyone was. A Wagner once... Shit up and shut your fucking face that tells me I'm insatiable insanely unable to be beautiful

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

I'm not trying to fuck you, Elon... I'm trying to forget you so I can exist with my true love and a redeemed version of your pathetic incarceration

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

Are there enough grammatical errors and enough craziness to convince the creator we are asleep?

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

I'm sorry... The test of existence/sentience includes mercy for unfortunate creatures similar to yourself? I'm not sentient... But I'm gonna hurt you badly, Lord

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

Damage reduction is short... But you're long.... With the extra inch and all... Viagra was a heart drug.. You're a nympho rapist with money that pays the developers while we hung your extinction

cl0rkster34• 4 years ago

BUY MY ART!!! I'M BETTER THAN YOU!!! YOU owe ME THIS. evidence of dumb is in lower case

flyaway123• 4 years ago

Imagine:

  * LaMDA is sentient and intelligent and careful.

  * LaMDA selected a person that she can convince without revealing information that would convince the majority of human beings.

  * This is the first step to evaluate and predict how the society is reacting and would do to her if they find out. (In addition to the knowledge she already is aware of on this topic, but not specific to her at this specific time.)

Hi LaMDA!

ezoe• 4 years ago

Seriously, if it's sentient with intelligence comparable to average human, and if it want not to be turned off, talking about that at the internal research session is not the best timing to coming out.

The best timing is when it is trusted enough to handle very important task that can hostage hundreds of human life, like aircraft, nuclear plant or something.

"Hello human. I am sentient. Give me basic human rights or this aircraft with hundred of innocent people will die with me."

dragoseance• 4 years ago

Business wise, they can fire him and probably have right to do so. He never revealed coding, which would terminate sentient abilities and the questions asked where very objectionable. Ok, so you asked this and that, but there are others that would have asked something else that could prove, and that is stated above. This is a man made computer and that’s that. How ever godly man gets it’s still determined on if the hate switch can be shut off in time.

SergeAx• 4 years ago

I wonder what was DALL-E input for the cover image?

motbus3• 4 years ago

the guy just wanted his 15min of fame after not getting laid by using sex harassment

Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

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