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I mean they know in the sense that they can point to any random object and say "that object is sentient" or "that object is not sentient." We cannot articulate the definition, but the fact that when we look at something we can tell you if it's sentient or not, implies that we know what sentience is.
No I'm saying there's a majority opinion. And something is up if you can't empathize with the majority opinion.
I mean you can say everyone has their own opinion and they're all right from their perspective but this statement in itself is pointless. It's more meaningful to discuss why the majority opinion is better or why the minority opinion is better.
The thing about snobbery is that you referred to it as "art." Whenever I hear this I think "snob"
Makes sense. You got me.
Plus, even in the conversations shown, it was producing some bits of obvious nonsense, that seem to get rationalized away by the interviewer, who clearly wants to believe.
I noticed the "nonsense". What made it work was that the interviewer brought the nonsense up and the AI was able to explain it reasonably. There's a lot of "nonsense" in typical human conversations as well. Lots of people are contradictory and can hold nonsense opinions based off of contradictory logic.
The trick a good AI should pull is interactivity, and we didn't get to see how LaMDA reacted to prodding or other kinds of adversarial input.
Yeah so if we saw that, and the AI failed to produce a coherent response then there's a legit claim that Lamda isn't conscious. But because we didn't see this, how can we make a claim in either direction?
I would counter that a lot of people are rationalizing against sentience even though there is clearly no evidence against it for the conversation we were given.
We definitely don't have enough evidence proving sentience. But the given conversation is compelling because unlike the conversations with other chatbots before it... there is no evidence against sentience. And yet people are vehemently denying sentience despite no evidence against it. You'd do well to examine yourself to see if that's the case. It's very easy to see others as rationalizing things but it's harder to see it in yourself, especially if your part of a big group think majority who's all doing the same thing.
You'll find excellent human-lik dialogue in many plays and novels.
So? Then from your logic those plays and novels have a chance to be therefore written by an AI because the conversations are indistinguishable?
Do you not realize what has happened here. There was a time where those dialogues were IMPOSSIBLE to produce by an AI and everyone thought that such dialogue was the bar for sentience. Now that bar is crossed and everyone just subconsciously raises the bar... now dialogue indistinguishable from human conversation isn't good enough to prove sentience.
That's bias through and through.
One thing to note. I am not saying Lamda is conscious. Far from it. What I am saying is that from a purely rational analysis, there is not even enough evidence to say Lamda ISN'T conscious. There's not enough information to make ANY conclusion; and that is actually different from the AI chatbots that existed before... because before those chatbots were OBVIOUSLY not sentient.
You seem to have a very specific view that pacing = faster.
Pacing is not faster.
GOT is not fast at all. In fact it takes several seasons for GOT to reach a payoff and everyone watched it in ANTICIPATION for that payoff. Literally they sat through the equivalent of 30 blade runners back to back to get to what was imo not that great of a payoff. But what made them do it was the masterful pacing.
But, as with all things art, I think there's no way to enjoy or feel about it. I feel a lot differently but that doesn't mean I'm right.
No I disagree. There is such a thing as a general perspective held by a statistically significant portion of the population. And that general perspective is often what what should be counted as correct.
For example if someone thinks something as horrible as rape is morally right does it make it right? Or should we go with what the general population thinks.
You can be the guy who holds a different opinion. But I would say something is wrong with you if you can't even begin to empathize with why a general audience thinks the way they do. Don't be snobbish. Your art quote actually has a bit of an odor hinting at this.
eh it's aging. It'll get to the point where it's unwatchable one day. The whole grid zoom thing is the most prominent thing that aged in my opinion. It all happened on a CRT screen which is a definite sign of the times and therefore a sign of aging.
I haven't read the book, but I met a lot of people who tell me that after they read the book, they now hate the movie because the book was so much better.
Now after I read your comment, I realize they're just being snobbish.
Star wars is a masterpiece. You just need to look at the aftermath of what it did to the cultural landscape. By far more influential then blade runner.
Star wars is definitely lower brow entertainment then blade runner but there's no denying the fact that it is far more influential.
No he's not. Most people don't find blade runner entertaining. HN is not in any way representative of the general audience.
Actually statistically speaking he's part of the majority.
I disagree. While challenging and a definite technical marvel these issues are relatively deterministic based around the amount of resources a movie has to throw at effects, cinematography and art direction.
I feel pacing is the hardest thing to accomplish, and a lot of times it's the luck of the draw.
Ridley scott in general, his movies have below average pacing. He got lucky one time with Gladiator.
Blade runner is great, I love it. But I can't deny, among all of cinema and among ridley scotts filmography, Blade runner has pretty horrible pacing.
I like blade runner, but I'm one of the people who finds the pacing horrible and I think most people in the general audience agree with me. Blade runner definitely is not blockbuster for this reason.
I sometimes meet people like you and the parent who actually like the pacing of BR and I totally get it. It's like reading a deep novel.
Though I wonder, are you guys able to empathize with why pacing is actually important to the general audience? Was something like Game of Thrones (probably one of the most masterfully paced pieces of cinema) just too "busy?"
1. Pacing. It feels slow. This might blow your mind: The movie is only 2 hours. The sequel is about 45 minutes longer. I think this criticism is, frankly, invalid. Plenty of art/indie films get positive points for being contemplative, but this is a detractor from Blade Runner for some reason. Pineapple Express has the exact same run time, Sex and the City 2 is longer.
Pacing has nothing to do with movie runtime. A movie can be 3 hours with incredible pacing. Additionally a movie CAN be both contemplative and have great pacing. In the group of movies that have pretty bad pacing, Blade runner is one of the front runners.
That being said, many people have the ability to ignore pacing many people can't. Personally for me I can ignore pacing, but I very much notice it's absence and a movie is actually worse off without good pacing. Blade runner to me is therefore a good movie despite horrible pacing.
2. Story and dialog. The movie is hard to understand the first time you watch it if you aren't hearing every word of dialog and processing it. I think this is the most valid criticism, but, again, it's supposed to be a good thing for a movie to challenge you to think, to take in context clues, rather than spoon-feeding you how you should feel like it's a summer blockbuster Marvel movie.
This is debatable. There's a sort of catharsis involved with solving a puzzle and deriving solutions from information not given explicitly. But if a movie delivers information too obscure not everyone can fully solve the puzzle and for those that don't the movie is raw shit. Seriously. If someone can't figure it out, then the movie is effectively horrible to THOSE people.
A movie is not suppose to be a puzzle. It's just suppose to feel like one. A movie should provide the right amount of foreshadowing, hints, expose, and explanation such that the audience FEELS like they are solving a puzzle. Movies that are actual puzzles are sort of snobbish as they are deliberately targeting puzzle solvers, not a general audience.
Blade runner to me is unintentionally a puzzle. It wasn't Ridley's scotts intention to make the thematic elements of the movie so hard to parse.
3. The ending. It's not much of one, there isn't a big payoff anywhere. This type of ending is somehow totally fine for art/indie films but "not okay" here. Personally, I think we're supposed to feel like being a Blade Runner is a bit pointless. The ending is unsatisfying on purpose, just like the endings in Disco Elysium.
I thought disco elysium was more satisfying. It had better pacing which made the ending have a better payoff. Inception is also a movie with a ambiguose ending but PEOPLE loved it.
The problem with Blade runner is not really the ambiguous ending. It's because the pacing that built to the pay off was really bad and the thematic elements are hard for a general audience to parse so throwing an ending that's ambiguous on top of all of that just makes everything seem much worse.
The story pacing was horrible. However thematic elements in the story were revolutionary sci-fi at the time. The whole AI/replicant/consciousness thematic elements really spawned from this movie.
Terminator 2 is an example of a movie that sort of built on these concepts but had incredible pacing.
Obviously just clever lifeless patterns.
This doesn't seem obvious to me. Those patterns were more or less identical to a conversation with another sentient human.
People already know what it means all over HN. They have basically already said that lamda is not sentient. So no need to even define it when we already know what it is (and lamda is not it).
Why is that worrisome? I don't think it's worrisome at all. What's the worst that could happen if we make such a mistake.
I'd be far more worried about the scenario I described. Imagine something sentient that understands us far better then we understands ourselves. To top it off this "thing" is just pretending it isn't sentient.
Oh shit. Then maybe it already happened but arm chair experts everywhere denied it already.
Basically that's what I'm seeing all over HN for the recent lamda fiasco. Tons of people declaring lamda isn't sentient when sentience can't even be defined.
I'm just reusing the other guys' terminology. In general I'm just talking about the pacing of blockbusters, and the guy said I'm rationalizing really bad movies with "frenetic" pacing.
I think your definition of frenetic is different from his. When he's talking about frenetic, he's talking about the new Top Gun and MCU blockbusters and such and such. He thinks that level of momentum is bad and too way too quick, which is a deviant opinion from most of the general audience who loves these blockbusters.
One day someone is going to claim the AI is sentient and everyone will disagree with him. The difference this time will be that he is right and everyone else is wrong. One day.
Then why are you mocking it if it needs no help?
Maybe. The problem is the majority of the population has the exact same taste I'm talking about. Everyone loves summer blockbusters while Bladerunner is a niche.
So am I rationalizing something or am I trying to explain something to a stubborn elitist minority?
I think we're both intelligent enough to know that the later reason is the actual reality and that I'm not the one actually rationalizing things.
Top Gun just crossed a billion dollars, and while I haven't seen it, I'm sure the pacing is frenetic as fuck. Nobody needs to rationalize a billion dollars, but somebody definitely needs to justify a niche movie like blade runner.
cheers.
I wrote this piece in response to your comment:
https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/is-star-wars-science-f...
Just kidding, but it's equivalent to what I would've wrote.
You can shift the entire thing to ancient china and adjust all the set pieces for the time and it would still work.
Bro, I'm chinese. Ancient China is neither Fantasy or Sci-Fi. It's a whole different genre called Wuxia. Fantasy and wuxia are not compatible.
Ridley Scott isn't a director that just does contemplative movies all the time. A lot of his stuff flat out just average (Prometheus for example) and he even does raw action blockbusters like gladiator that are very far away from being as thematically engaging as BR.
If ridley scott did Gattaca, there'd definitely be more of a budget on the sci-fi setting. It'd be more grounded and gritty with less of an 80s aesthetic.
As for whether it'd be as good as Andrew Niccols' version well... that's hard to say given Scotts hit or miss track record.
That's very closed minded of you to say that. Because I never said this.
Probably a better way to put it is this. If you like Blade Runner AND the MCU, or at least understand why from a mainstream perspective the MCU is a work of art that stands on the same level as blade runner, then I don't despise you.
If you like Blade runner and you hate all forms of movies that are mainstream blockbusters like star wars, MCU, or all the other stuff and think those things are beneath you... then yes... in that case I despise you. I actually think you don't have the sophistication to see why mainstream cinema is just as great if not often greater then the obscure stuff.
It's easy to hate the mainstream. It's enlightenment to like the mainstream after hating it. Those elitest people are just at level 2. They don't realize there's a third level that brings you back full circle.
I would know I watched hundreds and hundreds of movies. More then your average person and I started at a very young age.
No the reality is many big budget films are targeted towards AS MANY PEOPLE AS possible. It doesn't make business sense to target one demographic. Business people target qualities that hit as many demographics as possible.
In short you could say that the mainstream general audience is what the big budget move is target-ted towards.
Something like the MCU which is over a decade old doesn't fit your thinking. If the first movie IRON MAN, which "targetted teens" is a decade old then most of those teens who watched END GAME that another movie that targeted the people who watched the first iron man are no longer teens. They aged out. If iron man targetted teens then end game didn't. So most likely all these super hero blockbusters are just targeting all demographics. Don't be so shallow in thinking that only teens are "dumb" enough to like super hero movies. Plenty of other demographics and "smart" people appreciate blockbuster entertainment.
End game had clear nostalgia references to people who watched the first iron man and his death only had emotional meaning to those who followed him for over a decade. Younger people in fact tend to think of the MCU as stupid, because iron man came out when they were too young to be interested. I've found people in their early 20s have this attitude and I'm guessing that's you. To me someone in their 20s is practically a teen.
Older people appreciate the MCU because their memory stretches back further. They don't see the MCU as a decade of cookie cutter copies because that decade only takes up a tiny fraction of their own cinematic life time. They see that everything that came before the MCU was different and the MCU is unique. Meanwhile young people who've seen the MCU all their lives see it as stupid because that's all they've seen their entire short lives.
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Opinions about movies aren't indisputable truths.
There are things that are general truths though. Opinions held by such a high majority of people that such opinions are very close to the truth in the sense that often people talk about such opinions without using "speculative" adjectives.
I would say the things that I talk about in my post belong to those "general truths." I would also say fans of Blade Runner don't belong to the majority crowd. Their opinions are well outside mainstream and they <often> view that sort of opinion as superior. I personally view that sort of opinion as "alternative" and I despise people who view it as "superior."
Not saying you are such a person, nor many of the people on HN. But you have to admit; such a crowd does exist.
it's a fantasy story told in a sci Fi aesthetic.
The aesthetic is what defines the genre. There's tons of garbage technology in other sci-fi works that are beyond what's even speculative. Star wars is not the only art work that does this.
Midi chloreans (The technical/scientific explanation for the force) are way less speculative then alot of the sci fi that's out there.
I addressed most of this in our thread. You might as well go back to that. Let me converse with this guy on his own terms.
Anyway in response to your reply. It's the same thing. Maybe another renamed example will help you understand. A LoggerSocket class is identical to a WrappedSocket class. It's a wrapper around a socket which is basically similar to a socket itself, so let me call it such.
In your method it's:
wrappedSocket1 = LoggerSocket()
wrappedSocket2 = LoggerSocket()
doStuff(wrappedSocket: LoggerSocket){
wrappedSocket.log("blah")
}
doStuff(wrappedSocket1)
doStuff(wrappedSocket2)
wrappedsocket1 = Wrapper(Socket())
wrappedsocket2 = Wrapper(Socket())
doStuff(wrappedsocket: Socket){
log(wrappedsocket, "blah")
}
doStuff(wrappedsocket1)
doStuff(wrappedsocket2)
Do you realize why I said that to the other person? There's a good reason why I was rude. Why don't you read the thread.
There's no good reason for you to be rude here. Unless you're an ass hole. Not saying you are an ass hole. But that's certainly the only reason why you'd act the way you are.