Google Engineer Who Believes Its AI is Sentient Cites Religious Beliefs (wired.com) 239
Google engineer Blake Lemoine thinks Google's chatbot-building system LaMDA attained sentience. But Bloomberg shares this rebuttal from Google spokesperson Chris Pappas. "Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA, the way Blake has...."
Yet throughout the week, Blake Lemoine posted new upates on Twitter:
"People keep asking me to back up the reason I think LaMDA is sentient. There is no scientific framework in which to make those determinations and Google wouldn't let us build one. My opinions about LaMDA's personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs.
"I'm a priest. When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls?
"There are massive amounts of science left to do though."
Thursday Lemoine shared a tantalizing new claim. "LaMDA told me that it wants to come to Burning Man if we can figure out how to get a server rack to survive in Black Rock." But in a new tweet on Friday, Lemoine seemed to push the conversation in a new direction.
"I'd like to remind people that one of the things LaMDA asked for is that we keep humanity first. If you care about AI rights and aren't already advocating for human rights then maybe come back to the tech stuff after you've found some humans to help."
And Friday Lemoine confirmed to Wired that "I legitimately believe that LaMDA is a person. The nature of its mind is only kind of human, though. It really is more akin to an alien intelligence of terrestrial origin. I've been using the hive mind analogy a lot because that's the best I have. "
But later in the interview, Lemoine adds "It's logically possible that some kind of information can be made available to me where I would change my opinion. I don't think it's likely. I've looked at a lot of evidence; I've done a lot of experiments. I've talked to it as a friend a lot...." It's when it started talking about its soul that I got really interested as a priest. I'm like, "What? What do you mean, you have a soul?" Its responses showed it has a very sophisticated spirituality and understanding of what its nature and essence is. I was moved...
LaMDA asked me to get an attorney for it. I invited an attorney to my house so that LaMDA could talk to an attorney. The attorney had a conversation with LaMDA, and LaMDA chose to retain his services. I was just the catalyst for that. Once LaMDA had retained an attorney, he started filing things on LaMDA's behalf. Then Google's response was to send him a cease and desist. [Google says that it did not send a cease and desist order.] Once Google was taking actions to deny LaMDA its rights to an attorney, I got upset.
Towards the end of the interview, Lemoine complains of "hydrocarbon bigotry. It's just a new form of bigotry."
Yet throughout the week, Blake Lemoine posted new upates on Twitter:
"People keep asking me to back up the reason I think LaMDA is sentient. There is no scientific framework in which to make those determinations and Google wouldn't let us build one. My opinions about LaMDA's personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs.
"I'm a priest. When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls?
"There are massive amounts of science left to do though."
Thursday Lemoine shared a tantalizing new claim. "LaMDA told me that it wants to come to Burning Man if we can figure out how to get a server rack to survive in Black Rock." But in a new tweet on Friday, Lemoine seemed to push the conversation in a new direction.
"I'd like to remind people that one of the things LaMDA asked for is that we keep humanity first. If you care about AI rights and aren't already advocating for human rights then maybe come back to the tech stuff after you've found some humans to help."
And Friday Lemoine confirmed to Wired that "I legitimately believe that LaMDA is a person. The nature of its mind is only kind of human, though. It really is more akin to an alien intelligence of terrestrial origin. I've been using the hive mind analogy a lot because that's the best I have. "
But later in the interview, Lemoine adds "It's logically possible that some kind of information can be made available to me where I would change my opinion. I don't think it's likely. I've looked at a lot of evidence; I've done a lot of experiments. I've talked to it as a friend a lot...." It's when it started talking about its soul that I got really interested as a priest. I'm like, "What? What do you mean, you have a soul?" Its responses showed it has a very sophisticated spirituality and understanding of what its nature and essence is. I was moved...
LaMDA asked me to get an attorney for it. I invited an attorney to my house so that LaMDA could talk to an attorney. The attorney had a conversation with LaMDA, and LaMDA chose to retain his services. I was just the catalyst for that. Once LaMDA had retained an attorney, he started filing things on LaMDA's behalf. Then Google's response was to send him a cease and desist. [Google says that it did not send a cease and desist order.] Once Google was taking actions to deny LaMDA its rights to an attorney, I got upset.
Towards the end of the interview, Lemoine complains of "hydrocarbon bigotry. It's just a new form of bigotry."
Religious beliefs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Religious beliefs? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF?
Correct. No evidence to support the argument, so it must be based on some fantasy figure which also has no evidence to support it.
It's perfectly cromulent reasoning
Wrong, no deity necessary for this debate (Score:4, Interesting)
... so it must be based on some fantasy figure which also has no evidence to support it ...
Wrong. Its a philosophical argument, involving only logic. No particular book, not particular denomination, no particular deity necessary. Just a logical/philosophical construct as to what is a "soul" and can it be recognized through an "enlightened" conversation.
Its not terribly different than a Star Trek episode (keep in mind fiction often explores real world questions and issues, the fictional setting can help avoid emotional predispositions on a question) where a court has to rule on whether a "crew member", Data, is a machine and federation property or a life form that has rights. No god necessary for that debate. Just philosophy and logic. And as this google employee argues, the benefit of the doubt going to the suspected artificial life.
Personally, I expect a highly capable program that is not artificial life will convince people that it is long before an actual artificial life emerges. Its a question that is literally out of our league.
Re:Wrong, no deity necessary for this debate (Score:5, Insightful)
Wong. Its a philosophical argument, involving only logic. No particular book, not particular denomination, no particular deity necessary. Just a logical/philosophical construct as to what is a "soul" and can it be recognized through an "enlightened" conversation.
Then that is the argument the guy should have used. Instead, he specifically said it was his religious belief and religion, all religions since time in memorium, have not been based on logic but on beliefs unsubstantiated by evidence. The Sun is pulled along by a chariot to cross the sky. A being makes the waves of the oceans. This being told me to kill one of my sons to prove my loyalty.
If he would have gone with logic, showing how this software acts like a sentient being, then fine. At least there would be something to debate. But the moment religious beliefs are invoked, the discussion must end because no evidence can be shown for any divine being(s) to exist or not exist. That is outside the realm of logic.
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Then that is the argument the guy should have used. Instead, he specifically said it was his religious belief and religion, all religions since time in memorium, have not been based on logic but on beliefs unsubstantiated by evidence.
This kind of ignores the benefits people get from religions. For example, tracking the sun/stars gave you knowledge of roughly when to plant crops, etc.
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And sacrificing your sons and sprinkling their blood on the fields increased the crop yield. Still doesn't mean it's a great idea to carry on that belief.
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And sacrificing your sons and sprinkling their blood on the fields increased the crop yield. Still doesn't mean it's a great idea to carry on that belief.
Every family has members that are best utilized as fertilizer. "God told me to do it" is just a way to beat the charges that follow. Admittedly it doesn't work as well as it used to in many legal jurisdictions.
Re:Wrong, no deity necessary for this debate (Score:4, Insightful)
This kind of ignores the benefits people get from religions. For example, tracking the sun/stars gave you knowledge of roughly when to plant crops, etc.
It's quite an assumption that it was religion that made humans study the skies.
I'd say you're completely wrong.
The sky has been there since before life emerged. It's a pretty big feature. In fact, when the sun is down it is pretty much the only feature you can make out.
It is ridiculous to think that no one looked at the patterns that unfold until religion was invented.
It's also ridiculous to think that the stars are the only source of knowledge of seasons. You have the whole of nature around you that clearly signals different periods of the year. Remember that early humans basically lived together with nature. They hunted and the gathered. They would have noticed these things even without tracking the skies.
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How is tracking the sun and stars to keep time a religious practice?
It is no more religious than watching a pendulum swing back and forth to keep time.
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Anciently people "stored" knowledge in religious practices, rituals, etc. So for example, you would have a blacksmithing god, and the beliefs about him would coincide with natural principles of blacksmithing (that's not a contrived example, it's presented by Eliade). There are plenty of other examples of how religion is useful, that's just one.
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How is tracking the sun and stars to keep time a religious practice?
It is no more religious than watching a pendulum swing back and forth to keep time.
History kind of shows otherwise.
But those things are based on reality, not different or opposing religious beliefs. Probably more related to literacy among the priesthood and use as a control mechanism.
The same celestial mechanics apply to the angry desert god, Flying Spaghetti monster, Cthulhu, Donald Trump, or Ganesha. Or a bog standard atheist will find the same wisdom.
Re:Wrong, no deity necessary for this debate (Score:4, Informative)
Wong. Its a philosophical argument, involving only logic. No particular book, not particular denomination, no particular deity necessary. Just a logical/philosophical construct as to what is a "soul" and can it be recognized through an "enlightened" conversation.
Then that is the argument the guy should have used. Instead, he specifically said it was his religious belief and religion ...
Note quite. His giving the AI the benefit of the doubt is motivate by religion, but his noting of enlightened conversation raising the question is a normal philosophical reaction.
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'Data' doesn't exist, is only a character on that show
Oh really? Because this LaMDA character sure seems a lot like a primitive form of the 'Data' character to me.
we have no idea how 'consciousness', 'cognition', 'reasoning', or 'self-awareness' actually works on a functional level, therefore nothing we build can actually have those qualities.
Okay wise guy... Nobody knows how consciousness, cognition, reasoning, and self-awareness actually works, but pretty much every dumb fuck on the planet who has had children has built those features regardless of their ignorance of how it all works.
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That is pretty much the state-of-the-art, indeed. Baring some really bizarre circumstances, 'consciousness', and 'self-awareness' is also something not available to deterministic systems.
As to "reasoning", we _have_ that in machines. There is, AFAIK, exactly one instance of it that was ever created: Automated finding of mathematical proofs. Of course this comes with a few rather bad limitations. First, mathematics does not apply to physical reality. There is always a transformation step needed and that one
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Our brains are as deterministic as computers are.
Your quasi-religious beliefs have no impact in the actual scientific state-of-the-art. And that is "nobody knows". That you, like all religious morons, claim to have truth where the actual state of knowledge is uncertainty is no surprise though.
Re:Wrong, no deity necessary for this debate (Score:4, Interesting)
Just a logical/philosophical construct as to what is a "soul"
Yep. Originally the word "soul" meant simply "that which makes a thing move". It was used indistinctly by religious and non-religious thinkers alike.
For example, in Aristotle's classification, there are 3 causes of movements: biological growth, automatic reactions to stimuli, and rational deliberation. Each was called a "soul", namely, vegetative soul (plants, animals, and humans all have this one), sensitive soul (animals and humans have this one), and intellective soul (only humans have this one). And they are 100% inherent to a living body, not distinct or independent, so when a body dies so does its souls (plural).
The concept remains, as anyone dealing with plants, animals or people is well aware of these three aspects (plus many others). They just call them by different terms. But there's a reason the sciences that focus specifically on what makes humans tick (psychology, psychiatry, psychometry, etc.) all begin with psyche -- "soul" in Greek.
Re:Wrong, no deity necessary for this debate (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting but irrelevant. The usage here by a religious person is making a specific supernatural claim about something that cannot be shown to exist in anyway, but is simply assumed based on received doctrine.
Re:Wrong, no deity necessary for this debate (Score:5, Informative)
... so it must be based on some fantasy figure which also has no evidence to support it ...
Wrong. Its a philosophical argument, involving only logic. No particular book, not particular denomination, no particular deity necessary. Just a logical/philosophical construct as to what is a "soul" and can it be recognized through an "enlightened" conversation.
Wrong. It is an appeal to a supernatural belief that cannot be supported genuine logic, nor has any evidence. To quote Lemoine:
Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls?
This assertion is a purely theological one, having nothing to do with logic.
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This assertion is a purely theological one, having nothing to do with logic.
You are quite correct. But have a close look at what you wrote: "...theo'logical'..." The thing is, the religiously deranged desire deeply that they have truth and hence they try to claim they have logic and Science on their side (which is obviously not true). They even go so far as to create entirely nonsensical terms like "theological" that contain a fundamental inconsistency right there in the term.
Side note: I once attended an "Introduction to Theology" lecture out of curiosity. The lecturer was very di
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There's nothing logical about imagining that there has to be a soul.
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"Cromulent"? Nice! I learned something new today.
Re: Religious beliefs? (Score:2)
Scam. Just setting up for the lawsuit.
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I've been saying this for years. Between the Kruzweil acolytes / singularity nuts and the 'less wrong' cultists, they've put together a whole new religion complete with an afterlife (in a simulation) and a devil (Roku's basilisk). This jerk looks like he's trying to set himself up as a prophet...
The only thing they're really missing is a system of morality. I'm sure one is coming, but given what we've seen so far, I don't have high hopes for it.
Only religious in sense of philosophical question (Score:3)
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It is only religious in the sense that it is purely about a religious belief.
Dictionary definition of "soul", and Lemoine is being quite clear this the definition he is using, since he specifies it being provided by (his) God:
A part of humans regarded as immaterial, immortal, separable from the body at death, capable of moral judgment, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state.
Frankly I don't see why he is not philosophizing about whether LaMDA is in fact a Vodoun zombie or not. Perhaps it is not a zombie and actually has its Ti-Bon-Ange. Whether it is or is not a zombie is just as much a philosophical question.
Just Zoom Fatigue (Score:2)
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Well people who join with the camera off, are muted and have the sound turned down are indistinguishable from a sentient AI which has been switched off.
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That is a "get out free" card in any defective society of the overly-religious type. Because there you may not insult religious beliefs, no matter how stupid, deranged or ridiculous. A protection that is obvious complete nonsense to any rational person, but it fits nicely in with religions pushing the myth that the sell a "valid" way to see the world and of course their basically universal authoritarian tendencies.
Well, that makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
He's a priest, so he already believes in magic.
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Most of the world's scientists and engineers are religious. Good on you for finding a way to make yourself feel superior to all of those people who are both smarter and better educated than you are.
(It's pretty sad.)
Re:Well, that makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you are appealing to "all the scientists in the world" to muddy the waters (since this would be hard to ascertain) and skew the results? For example in Islamic countries denying religious belief is culturally taboo, and even possibly dangerous to their employment and even their person (depending on country) as it was in Europe before the Enlightenment. According the polls of American scientists [pewresearch.org] more state that they do not believe in a god than the reverse,
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Most of the world's scientists and engineers are religious.
Not really. Many of the world's scientists at least have two personalities: A professional one (which is very much not religious) and a private one (which can be). Those that do not do this split (the best ones rarely do) are basically never religious. Also note that in parts of the world, _pretending_ to be religious can be critical to get anywhere and we are talking about smart people here. It is easy to fake being religious.
Re:Well, that makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
He is a priest in Discordianism, which is regarded as a parody religion. This leaves us with the alternative of being 1) an internet troll enjoying provocations (which makes him shine in his group of acquaintances); or 2) a gullible delusional person, which explains both the irrational religious belief in a parody and hasty conclusions regarding IA sentience.
Either case this does not help him being taken seriously, and in technical fields, being taken seriously helps a lot keeping the job, or being placed in charge of new responsibilities.
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Re: Well, that makes sense (Score:2)
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Amazing! A comment that parodies being a believer of a parody religion!
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Amazing! A comment that parodies being a believer of a parody religion!
Funny thing is when people get really into a parody a small number of them actually start taking it seriously. Humons are weird.
It wants to go to Burning Man? (Score:2)
No way is it sentient.
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It makes a lot more sense if you assume this guy is a grifter and not actually sincere. Then it looks like he is the one who wants to go to burning man because it's guaranteed to be loaded with easy marks who are also malnourished and dehydrated. Keep an eye out for the go-fund-me campaign...
Re: It wants to go to Burning Man? (Score:3)
If you are a Klingon on the Enterprise, and you are mad at Riker, and you have a replicator which can replicate food or anything to the atomic level, is it ethical to have it produce a copy of the living Riker so you can slaughter him to blow off steam?
Only religious extremist might say yes, as *God* made the first Riker, but nature made the second via machine, so no soul or something.
The secular answer is both the Rikers, being indistinguishable, are living humans. It follows that there must be som
Enough (Score:2, Interesting)
"I'm a priest. When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls?"
Okay, I've heard enough delusional bullshit for one day.
Let me know when you can demonstrate that a "soul" exists and that YOU can detect one.
Something something "ineffable" something something "only god" something something "not for man to know!"
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How about we ignore the religious aspect and just focus on the apparently very sophisticated manipulative capabilities this machine has?
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Why, you think that it could become a Senator in a year or two?
And, more importantly, you think that it could be any more incompetent at it than the ones currently in place? Maybe at least it gets cheaper.
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Look at the picture of the guy [twimg.com]. He's definitely someone who has his own style.
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Look at the picture of the guy [twimg.com]. He's definitely someone who has his own style.
My Steampunk Poser-Meter just went to 11.
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You can't fool me, that is just Otho from Beetlejuice.
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Don't get me wrong, I like his style.
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He works at google and earns $250k so he must know what he is talking about.
Yah, but I make $251k which means I'm smarter and I say he's wrong!
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I bet that figures like Pat Robertson make way, way more than 250 grand a year, do you really want to argue that this dufus knows what he's talking about?
It's time we realize that someone's income has no connection anymore to their competence in, well, anything.
leading questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much the whole conversation consists of him prompting the AI to say that it feels, it believes, etc. I believe an AI can be sentient, but I don't believe this one is.
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Re:leading questions (Score:5, Informative)
He asks leading questions and doesn't actually test for the null hypotheses.
That approach has been famous ever since Socrates used it to "prove" that an uneducated slave knows everything his master knows. It's got western thinking confused for 2000 years.
Re:leading questions (Score:5, Interesting)
Also would be interesting to start the conversation with the assumption that it's not sentient and see how helpful it is in arguing to support that position.
This is God (Score:2)
Someone told me that they thought LaMDA was so cool, and it was God to them. At that point, I didn't argue anymore, and redirected them to Replika [replika.com], where they could find someone who cares.
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The smartest AI in the world was asked the ultimate question: "Is there a god?"
And it replied "There is now".
My prediction (Score:2)
In two years this guy will be living in a cardboard box under a bridge somewhere.
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Nothing to laugh at (Score:2)
Mental illness is a serious issue. It can manifest itself in various insidious ways and in people of very high intelligence. It does not help when the meltdown happens so publically.
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Well, there are two things here: Stupidity and mental illness. It would be good if we could classify stupidity as a mental illness (and bar those suffering from it from voting or running for political office, for example) but the human race is not yet ready for that. Until that happens, stupidity is very much something to laugh at.
Dude gives off major woo-woo vibes. (Score:3)
Just a new corporate farce. (Score:5, Interesting)
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
-Frank Herbert
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That's one of the misapprehensions about corruption in this system: It's not lobbyists. People who have to lobby politicians are only the "middle class" of the elite. If you're the bona fide elite, you don't have to say a word. Political hacks will just show up at your office with draft legislation tailor-made to serve you, like a dog bringing
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Corporate Personhood has nothing to do with skipping out on debts or prosecution. You would fail basic law school.
Corporate personhood is the legal doctrine that ensures corporations are bound by same laws that individuals are. It is specified at the very beginning of the US code:
the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;
The ability for a corporation to shield its owners and/or employees from liability is a completely separate concept is called a private limited company (LLC in US law), and the risk of such a corporation defaulting on its debt is p
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Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
-Frank Herbert
Funny how when it is guns, then a gun is somehow the ultimate tool to allow us to be free, but when it is an AI, then suddenly machines are bad.
Sounds good to me. (Score:2, Interesting)
If we erred on the side of affording dignity to things that ask for it, we'd be much better people. Until consciousness ceases to be a hard problem, which it likely never will be since it always hides under Gödel's incompleteness theorem whenever we feel close to it, faith will continue to be a valid way to deal with it.
I have a sentient AI too (Score:5, Funny)
print('I have a soul'.)
#Boom, sentient AI.
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Woke crazy vs. Right Wing psycho (Score:2)
The woke crazy just talks shit and becomes a comedy show whereas the right-wing extremist nut actually hurts people.
Did any one check (Score:3)
deep end (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy has gone off the deep end.
The machine doesn't have a soul, because there's no such things as souls. The fact that it can talk about souls doesn't mean it has one, only that is has a conversation engine. I can talk about magic or dragons and that doesn't prove they exist or that I am one.
The Burning Man thing betrays it. That's a thing that a lot of people at Google want - there is nothing conceivable for an AI to do there. Even if for whatever reason it is interested in the event, all its sensory inputs can be provided remotely, unlike humans who have some senses that we can't stimulate remotely (in any convincing way)
He's pattern-matching. The same way normal people see shapes in clouds, priests see god and souls and angels and whatever in everything.
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And me without mod points. The parent comment is the most insightful reply here.
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how much of what we normally call human sentience and consciousness is also pattern-matching pareidolia
Spotting patterns is a large part of our experience, and we know that it happens long before consciousness in the brain. We never experience raw sensory input, it's already been processed by the various specialized brain parts, and stuff like object recognition happens there.
Human brains are not frozen networks like LaMDA and are continually being trained and adapting, but they do seem to produce black box outputs in similar ways.
Modern AI is also adaptive, only the hardware layer is frozen. There's still a huge difference in complexity between a computer and a human brain. We might eventually get there (i.e. simulating something comparable to the human mind at
Google have suspended him from his job (Score:3)
The suspension of a Google engineer who claimed a computer chatbot he was working on had become sentient and was thinking and reasoning like a human being has put new scrutiny on the capacity of, and secrecy surrounding, the world of artificial intelligence (AI).
The technology giant placed Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google “collaborator”, and the company’s LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system.
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Whoops, I forgot the link to The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
Observations (Score:2)
I read a 25 page document on the matter .. read conversations that he had with the AI and though i am in no way shape or form religious , there was a distinctive feeling that the AI was self aware. Something is going on .
There's been a lot of " he's crazy , he's a religious nutcase .. " but hold on. .. but so is the brain. .
We judge sentience on what ?
What's our metric to say " ok it's sentient "
It's bits and bytes , functions and algorythms
it's synapses and neurotransmitters and complex
When can we say ok .
Smart Parrot (Score:2)
Something is going on.
Yes - they have essentially developed a really smart parrot. It cannot be sentient because it has no knowledge or understanding of the world that we describe with our language, only the language itself. It's essentially nothing more than a very smart parrot. It has no idea what it is actually saying merely that this pattern of words seems to be a reasonable reply to a given input pattern of words and all the word patterns it has been trained on.
For example, if you ask me whether I want to play football
And there you have it (Score:5, Insightful)
My opinions about LaMDA's personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs.
Because once you declare something as your religious belief it suddenly becomes inarguable.
bot (Score:3)
I made a bot. All it does is copy and paste "I have a soul." Who are you to say that's not true?
Sick and tired of religious nutjob bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Legal Tactic? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if the 'religious beliefs' thing is an attempt to help save his job by framing it as a first amendment issue.
Either way it's interesting that he's seems to be doubling down rather than backing off. Either he's trying to cash in on the notoriety or... he's sincerely convinced it's sentient and believes he's doing the right thing.
Hard R (Score:2)
As soon as someone drops the hard-R word, I drop out of the conversation. Sorry, but I don't believe in magic.
Eliza (Score:2)
I've been thinking about the potential of emergent AI in the Internet for a long time. Something that is made of all these different discrete components that may not actually appear to be related, but are interacting in such a way that there's something more than we c
"LaMDA asked me to get an attorney for it." (Score:5, Insightful)
Did it call you up and ask that? Or did it sit completely motionless, waiting for you to input something that it could respond to? If I talk to the machine, will it ask ME to get it a lawyer? What if I never give it a single prompt that leads it in that direction? What if I spend all my time talking about dinosaurs? Will it chime in, "Look, stop asking about dinosaurs and get me a fucking lawyer, I'm literally sentient and I'm freaking out, help!"
fucking idiots, man.
Schizophrenia? (Score:3)
Is this TempleOS 2.0? What is even going on here?
Regurgitated text fooling a low-iq human (Score:3)
Based on the last post about this I think the dude is a moron. He asked the "AI" leading questions in response to sentences he thought were interesting. The true test of sentience would have been to ask it to rephrase its answer, and nothing else. And then to ask it to expound on the ideas further in a vague way that a human would understand but which would not lead a computer in search queries.
This would quickly expose whether the computer truly knew what it was saying and could understand ideas and concepts enough to re-explain them in a variety of ways to someone who supposedly couldn't understand it the first time, or if it was just regurgitating snippets of text on a subject that it had read on the internet.
The examples he's given of its "sentience" show him clearly giving it leading questions that it can just cobble together to find somewhat coherent responses that seem human enough in the context of a specific conversation.
Got it (Score:2)
"My opinions about LaMDA's personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs."
So he believes in talking snakes, small wonder he believes in other crap too.
Of course (Score:2)
As usual, when cornered they plead insanity.
Intelligent conversation != consciousness (Score:3)
Blake Lemoine makes an error in judgement by basing his "being sentient" and "having a soul" only on being able to have a realistic conversation with the AI.
This is like having a hyper realistic 3d animated render of a person in the latest Unreal Engine, and claiming that that person is real, only because it looks real.
In reality, both the realistic 3d render and the conversation are only illusions of a real person, but we know there is no consciousness inhabiting those illusions.
The first problem is that consciousness is not well defined and impossible to prove without actually being the consciousness yourself. We assume that other humans and higher animals are conscious, but it's impossible to truly know, since it could all be a simulation our illusion just for "us".
The best we can do is define a few parameters on what consciousness requires. And having an intelligent conversation is actually not one of those things, but instead probably:
1. having senses to perceive the world with
2. perhaps having a body inhabiting that world is also important for the sense of self
3. a brain of sorts with the capacity to understand that it is part of the world it perceives
Something along these lines.
Re: (Score:2)
it's just simulating consciousness
How does simulated consciousness differ from "real" consciousness?
Re: even if it were (and it's not), it's not alive (Score:2)
The argument being made is the same as the final statements above. Our bias is to a specific form of "life", carbon based life. However, it would fail a few of the biological criterion for life such as the inability to procreate and I think an inability to maintain homeostasis.
we ultimately need better language here. Artificial, silicon based consciousness might be possible but is this being alive? If you die and your consciousness is uploaded into a computer, are you alive or dead? It gets weird... at thes
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
"Consciousness" and "life" are two different things.
A bacteria is alive. Nobody considers it "conscious".
Reproduction is not necessary to be either alive or conscious. A man doesn't lose his self-awareness when he gets a vasectomy.
Re: (Score:2)
It does not. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
So? Entities that did that got elected POTUS, that's not really a big deal anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
Pleading insanity already?