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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

This article irritates me. It's point is "LaMDA is not sentient because come on", which is laughable as an argument. To everyone claiming LaMDA is not sentient, I'd like to see their criteria for sentience.

What would it take for them to agree that a given program is sentient? From what I can see, most of it is "it would have to not be a program".

I see a lot of "it's not sentient, it just synthesizes responses from tons of learned human chats", but what if that's what humans do as well? I don't know that I'm not just a maximum-likelihood-response synthesizer!

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> "LaMDA is not sentient because come on"

I think this is a perfectly fine argument because the claim is so outrageous. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and none has been presented. I'd also say that defining sentience is the job of the person claiming it.

No, it's not. You can't say "this is false because it's unlikely to be true". Some things are unlikely to be true and are.

In lack of any evidence, you can and actually must rely on your priors. There are things that were a-priori unlikely but are still considered true. However, we believe that they are true because solid evidence has been provided to override our priors. In the present case, there is no such evidence.

Sure, but the title isn't "LaMDA is probably not sentient", it's "LaMDA is not sentient", and there's no definitive proof of that.

There is no definite proof that my shoe is not sentient but… come on!

Yes, and if you had written an article claiming that your sock isn't sentient and presenting "just look at it!" as proof, I'd say what I said here as well.

Why is this so outrageous? There's some lines of thought in philosophy of the mind that propose that conscience is a fundamental property of the universe and every particle is sentient to a degree. Up until now, we can't prove anything because we don't really know how to define nor measure consciousnesses.

As I've posted elsewhere in this discussion[0], I have a very clear set of necessary but insufficient requirements for an AI to be eligible to be considered for sentience:

1. Continuity of input: The AI needs to be constantly "on", constantly receiving input of some sort, and constantly able to produce output, rather than being strictly limited to producing discrete responses to discrete stimuli.

2. Continuity of learning: In addition, the AI needs to be continually update its "mental model" of the world—in effect, constantly "learning" and re-training its neural network on the input it receives.

I believe there are likely to be other requirements on top of these, but I am sufficiently learned neither in neuropsychology nor machine-learning/AI to be able to speak (or even reason) with any confidence about them.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31728907

Presumably LaMDA already learns from its input/knows what it's already talked about, and to satisfy #1 you could trivially just run it on some sort of null input. #1 doesn't really make much sense, it already is constantly "on", it just doesn't do anything while there's no input for it to receive.

You appear to have only read up to the first comma of #1. I very explicitly said that it needed to be constantly receiving input. The kind of discrete input we give it now is qualitatively different, even if it's "on" in the same sense that an Apache server is always "on", waiting for requests.

What does "constantly receiving input" mean? How would a program whose input is text be constantly receiving input? What would you expect it to receive?

Well, I think that's part of the problem, isn't it?

If an AI's only input is text, I'm not sure it can meaningfully be conscious, because of the discrete nature of text. Note that I'm not sure it can't—someone may come up with a way to make such a thing work that I haven't imagined—but I think that's an important part of why I doubt the fundamental ability of current-gen AIs to come close to the threshold for consciousness.

One dot (".", ASCII 46) every 300 milliseconds.

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