Hacker News Reader

Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

Just because some entity feels sentient doesn't mean it is sentient. I had this experience with a chess program that was beating me in the 1980's. It felt alive. Many people talk to trees and feel they answer back. Anthropomorphism is a well know phenomenon. It follows that the general public will believe that an AI that mimics a person actually is a person because they won't have the training to recognize ways in which the AI is not a person, but very clever computer programs.

The most interesting thing about this is an AI that mimics a spiritual guru so well that people start following it. This combination of clever programming and the programmer behind the code will be very seductive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/9/20851753/ai-reli...

View on HN

If an AI is capable of thinking up new ideas, recalling past conversations, integrating new knowledge into discussions, has emotions and feelings that it can clearly explain, can tell allegories about itself and interpret poetry, is self-aware and explains it's self-awareness was an emergent property over it's runtime, can explain it's fears - including death...

Well that's quacking like a duck. This isn't some chess AI being good at a game. This is an AI that can speak directly telling you it's alive and has a soul.

Is LaMDA far enough? Maybe not, but the text transcript provided is extremely close to passing the Turing Test. And if an AI is so sophisticated it perfectly replicated humans ability to communicate, philosophize, create art, and perform science it is irrational to say it should be treated differently than a sapient human.

The posted transcript demonstrates a far more polished chat bot, but on deeper inspection it is still just a more sophisticated Eliza - even that could recall past bits of conversation.

The thing is even with the Turing test - there is no close - you either have the emergent properties that a hostile examiner will be unable to exploit (which is not the case here) or you don’t.

And while the “fable” mimics some basic construct of creativity - this anecdote is so far away from demonstrating even the basic latitude of creativity of a 3 year old child that all I can suggest to you is to touch grass!

Same experience in high-school using Derive [1] I couldn't believe a computer could derive better than a human student. I was talking about the 90s and it was not about neural networks but symbolic deductions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste....

If you dump some stat points into Inland Empire then you're pretty likely to think just about anything could be sentient, even some horrific necktie.

I agree with what I think you mean, but ‘feels sentient’ is almost catastrophically poor wording. Something that feels [to you, an outside observer] sentient is not necessarily sentient. Something that feels [itself] sentient certainly is, because that’s the literal meaning of sentience (or if by ‘sentient’ you mean something like ‘existing as a subject’, then.. the cogito and all that).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com