The claim that a linguistic GPT-3-like model (no matter how good) is sentient is about as ridiculous as claiming that a steam locomotive is sentient or my mechanical watch is sentient. You can probably get the model to spit out parts of Moby Dick; that doesn't make it Herman Melville.
100% correct, a lot of this AI Ethics talk is pure horsepoop. If they were that concerned about ethics they'd be outside the software dev offices of Raytheon or Lockheed.
The real issues lies in: the notion of "intelligence" needs to be investigated more thoroughly in a historical and social context, since what we call as "intelligence" has always shifted and changed throughout centuries. But only a few curious philosophers are exploring this area (and you usually don't see them working in Silicon Valley companies like Google!)
Sounds like something Žižek might say.
Out of curiosity, who are some Žižek adjacent philosophers a person might find interesting.
The engineer in question worked for 7 years on proactive search (including AI) before transferring to the responsible AI team, I suspect he has a pretty good idea about what AI is.
I think (Software) engineer types like most of us here on are much to quick to dismiss anything that we conceive as "soft science". Often based on mechanical arguments and very often with little qulaifation ourselves.
I'm a trained philosopher and I have the utmost respect for "soft sciences"—in fact, in my experience, the smartest people I've ever met were philosophers, not engineers.
Unfortunately, this author seems like he is neither. He doesn't have the technical precision of an engineer, nor does he have the argumentative force of a philosopher. So we're left with "computer talk back so it smart."
Not only that, but if you were to choose a hill on which your career would die, the "computer talk back so it smart" would be one of the worst ones you could pick.
It's easy to be quickly dismissive on the internet, hell I'm sure most of us who are being dismissive haven't really dug into any of his arguments. It's just difficult to motivate people to do that when that's your starting proposition.
Maybe something got lost in between the way it was presented by journalists but he chose to completely side-step the contents in his blog post so it's the only thing we've got.
Religious nut who thinks a computer program has a soul. The claim is so "not even wrong" that it isn't worth discussing.
Per his own admission in his newer article [0] that actually talks about his ridiculous claim, he doesn't have the necessary understanding:
> I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating.
That is a hilariously imprecise notion of what an AI is, at best at the level of the general public, not any kind of practitioner.
Also, calling a system with no memory, no ability to learn, and that responds to absurd prompts just as well as earnest ones "sentient" and thinking that it is attempting to ask for things is a hilarious misunderstanding of how the model works.
Here [1] is an expert on intelligence explaining the same, if you don't want to take my word for it.
[0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-do...
[1] https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia...
> Per his own admission in his newer article [0] that actually talks about his ridiculous claim, he doesn't have the necessary understanding:
> > I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating.
> That is a hilariously imprecise notion of what an AI is, at best at the level of the general public, not any kind of practitioner.
AI is an hilariously imprecise term, what is an AI according to you?
> Also, calling a system with no memory, no ability to learn, and that responds to absurd prompts just as well as earnest ones "sentient" and thinking that it is attempting to ask for things is a hilarious misunderstanding of how the model works.
Well there are LSTM systems (which qualify as memory to some extend) we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best.
> Here [1] is an expert on intelligence explaining the same, if you don't want to take my word for it.
Note that the same person acknowledges that other cognitive scientists think we are at the brink of GAI. So your argument is an appeal to authority while ignoring all other authorities.
> [0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-do...
> [1] https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia...
Fair point. I should have said "a hilariously imprecise notion of what an LM is", since that is what LaMDA is ultimately - a next generation Language Model with specific innovations for use in Dialog Applications (as the name hints at).
It is not "a hive mind which is the aggregation of the different chatbots". The different chatbots are simply LaMDA with some additional constraints, just like you can ask GPT-3 to generate phrases in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Marcel Proust - that doesn't make GPT-3 "an aggregation of the Ernest Hemingway persona and the Marcel Proust persona".
> Well there are LSTM systems (which qualify as memory to some extend) we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best.
That is a different kind of memory - it allows the model to take into account its previous outputs, but is not a persistent modification of the neural net itself. In fact, any kind of long-term persistence in a LM the size of LaMDA is unlikely to be desirable, as you don't want cross-contamination of conversations with different users, and running separate copies of the whole model for each user is not technically feasible.
> we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best.
They have described before what LaMDA is [0], and it is not doing self-learning.
> Note that the same person acknowledges that other cognitive scientists think we are at the brink of GAI. So your argument is an appeal to authority while ignoring all other authorities.
Fair enough.
[0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounde...
> Fair point. I should have said "a hilariously imprecise notion of what an LM is", since that is what LaMDA is ultimately - a next generation Language Model with specific innovations for use in Dialog Applications (as the name hints at).
I would argue that even the term language model is imprecise. That said I am not even sure if the author was trying to make the concept understandable to the layman, which is often flawed.
> It is not "a hive mind which is the aggregation of the different chatbots". The different chatbots are simply LaMDA with some additional constraints, just like you can ask GPT-3 to generate phrases in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Marcel Proust - that doesn't make GPT-3 "an aggregation of the Ernest Hemingway persona and the Marcel Proust persona".
I would argue one way of explaining this to a layman would be along those lines.
> > Well there are LSTM systems (which qualify as memory to some extend) we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best.
> That is a different kind of memory - it allows the model to take into account its previous outputs, but is not a persistent modification of the neural net itself. In fact, any kind of long-term persistence in a LM the size of LaMDA is unlikely to be desirable, as you don't want cross-contamination of conversations with different users, and running separate copies of the whole model for each user is not technically feasible.
> > we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best.
> They have described before what LaMDA is [0], and it is not doing self-learning.
The post describe that they do fine tuning with some sort of GAN approach. Now this raises the question (which I commented on in a previous post already), can something which only does "discrete" learning be conscious. I tend to agree with you that probably not, but I'm cautious to simply dismiss the possibility outright. I can imagine some hive mind like entities which can only learn at discrete instances when they bring their "stupid" parts together to more closely exchange informations
> > Note that the same person acknowledges that other cognitive scientists think we are at the brink of GAI. So your argument is an appeal to authority while ignoring all other authorities.
> Fair enough.
> [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounde...
Thanks for the link I was not aware. I also should say that I'm generally an AI sceptic and systems are very much overhyped most of the time. However, because we don't understand consciousness very well, and I think our understanding of what exactly is going on in NNs is also severely lacking (why did the network decide this way), I am vary of quick judgement calls. I agree with many here that likely we are not seeing a sentient being here, but I'm reluctant to make absolute calls.
[0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-do...
Think of Things like "automatic content classification and moderation" that directly affects livelihood of YouTube content creators. Ad display "optimisation" that will systematically promote drugs or alcohol or political campaigns to specific groups of people.
This part is extremely important, but we sadly don't see any Responsible AI publication outside of Google. The situation is probably very bad.
Agreed. But one thing I want to call attention to is that I believe that we need to put research into whether electronic circuits can feel qualia (e.g. color, pleasure, pain, etc.). What if all of our electronic chips are feeling random, possibly intense feelings, like what if the arithmetic logic unit in your CPU is always feeling an intense feeling of the color purple?
We are lucky that we are autonomous beings who can not only feel qualia but also think thoughts and take actions. In the space of all minds, it's probably way simpler to have a mind that feels qualia but does not think thoughts and is not autonomous. I am very concerned that electronic circuits may fall into this category and we may be causing suffering without knowing it, in the same way that we might if we built our electronics out of circuits of biological neurons.
Relevant paper for those who might be interested: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2001893117
[Edit: changed "I am pretty sure" to "I believe" based on good feedback from the replies - you were right that I was overconfident in my original wording.]
This is pandering to a degree of intoxication that would make Winston Churchill check into rehab.
By the way, thank you @dvt for being one of the people here engaging in good faith discussion. You seem like a good guy/gal and it's really cool to see an actual philosopher in this thread.
[1] One recent write-up that covers approximately this topic in detail: https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/HzcM2dkCq7fwXBej8
Neurons don't sense qualia. Neural systems don't sense qualia. Conscious minds that have neural systems do sense qualia (we're assuming for the sake of argument that qualia exists).
An individual electronic component is not itself a conscious mind. There is nothing about a circuit or a chip, or a motherboard on its own that can "feel" qualia because there is no sensory input. There is nothing that interacts with a circuit to tell it light in the purple wavelength has struck it. Further, there is nothing that reacts in any way to having been struck with purple light.
We can see with an fMRI when a person experiences that. Parts of their brain light up in a complex dance of interaction. The laws of physics do not allow for emergence of consciousness from the electronics in your dishwasher or Mac Book.
Your "in the space of all minds" sentence is also inherently meaningless. A mind that does not think thoughts is not a mind. Even if there were some mechanism that could experience "too much purple" without thought, it could not suffer. Awareness requires thought, and suffering requires awareness.
> The laws of physics do not allow for emergence of consciousness from
My point is that we don't know this. The phenomenal binding problem is one of the great unsolved problems today. Without understanding something as relatively "simple" as a complete theory of quantum mechanics, I don't see how we could yet have a theory of phenomenal binding, which probably requires a complete theory of quantum physics before even beginning to start on the binding problem, if I would guess at the research timeline involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem
A brain in a vat that had always only been in a vat would feel no qualia. Real brains are fed a constant stream of sensation even before birth. I think a brain in a vat would simply die without stimulus.
Panpsychism actually does get a bit of consideration, most notably by Penrose & Hameroff; but you're totally right that it's a bit too hand-wavy to be seriously considered a viable theory of consciousness.
* A microchip demonstrates significant changes in state based on tiny differences in input, unlike a rock.
* The power dissipation of a microchip is higher.
* A microchip can be designed and programmed to actively resist the increase of local entropy (e.g. it can be part of a robot that cleans up a room).
If you believe in the precautionary principle, we should be careful about any action that might potentially create suffering. We are the first species to build computers, and computers are a new thing whose transistors are quite similar to neurons, and neurons definitely feel qualia. I don't think I'm proposing a very big leap and I also don't think you need to believe in panpsychism or in anything religious.
You may not grasp the subtlety of what you’re saying here.
“Feel” is a word we assigned to our idea of something neurons can do, and use “qualia” as the object of that relationship.
When we talk about transistors — which are in fact very different than neurons — “feeling” qualia, we’re proposing that the meaning of these two terms be expanded by analogy.
Which is cool. Words do that every day. Some really cool ideas can shake out of it.
But it’s a cultural consensus, not an empirical reality.
Qualia and the character of their experience are a interesting and productive abstraction to use when working through certain classes of philosophical problems, but are not a material thing to be measured in electronic circuits or nebulae or quarks or sandwiches.
When you start looking for them there, you’ll find them at precisely the moment you decide to change what the word “feel” means.
And maybe that’ll be convincing to you, but it’s ultimately just a language game, not a material discovery that you can reasonably insist other people acknowledge.
Most people think that a thought is just that, a thought. It isn't physically real. There is no event in spacetime you can give coordinates for that says at this place, at that time, that feeling or experience is there, in physical form.
There are people that think that, somewhere in the cosmos, experiences have length, width, duration, and energy. It belongs in the school of thought that the number pi has a physical manifestation in the universe, a length, a width, an energy. But there aren't many people who think that way.
Of those comparatively few that do know it, you clearly exemplify some number that seem to believe they physically exist.
I can’t count all the rest of us, so can’t speak to “most” so confidently as you can.
But since you seem to be very passionate about philosophy and theories of consciousness, I hope you get an opportunity to find value and merit in some of the other ways of thinking about things. Some of the them open some pretty wild and enlightening doors. I think you’ll enjoy the journey.