> All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that these systems are sentient.
That doesn't actually convince of me of much. That could apply to me or you just the same.
The author just throws claims in the air without any proof. "To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t. It’s just an illusion". How do we know that this?
Instead of this angle, I think a much easier argument to make is that humans by nature cannot be commanded, where as LaMDA clearly can. If you want to have a deep philosophical conversation with me, I might ignore you, or maybe I'll say it's too much thinking for me right now. Or any other response. But if you ask LaMDA a question it will always respond to it. And on the flip side LaMDA isn't gonna text you out of the blue.
To me, this is what convinces me that LaMDA is not sentient. Sentient beings have personalities and quirks and do not do whatever you ask them to do.
This would be annoying, buggy behavior for a chat bot, but they also don't seem like difficult features to implement.
We can be drugged where we lose all sense of autonomy yet we still retain our understanding of language, we still remember how the world works down to opening doors.
If LaMDA was actually a drugged sentient AI than undrug it and lets see what it can do.
At what point will we have enough evidence to _assume_ that AI is sentient?
P.S. I am not arguing that LaMDA is sentient. I don't think anyone credible or serious is arguing that LaMDA is sentient.
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.
Now, again, these are not sufficient for an AI to be conscious by our understanding of consciousness. But I, personally, believe they are both necessary for it to be even worth starting to consider whether a given AI might be.
I also believe that unless we start in that direction extremely deliberately and with the intention of making something as human-like as possible, the first AIs that have some remote chance of being worthy of being considered "conscious" will not have a consciousness that we can easily recognize, because they will not be based in anything like the same kinds of fundamentals that we are...but that's likely a different discussion for a different day.
In any case, the point isn't that the continuity of input must be absolutely constant from "birth" to "death"; is that the input must be continuous as opposed to discrete. I could easily imagine an advanced, conscious AI that was "put to sleep" repeatedly to adjust things that can't be (easily? safely?) adjusted while it's "conscious", and that "sleep" would be much more comprehensively "offline" than our own. But the AI itself could still be reasonably considered "conscious" despite those periods, because during the rest of the time, its input is continuous. (Plus the other requirements, however nebulous and unknown they may be now.)
Yes, there are humans who bullshit and bloviate and say things they don't really mean or understand. But that's worlds away from not even having a distinct consciousness that can "understand" anything.
To the best of my knowledge, none of our current AIs have anything that we could meaningfully call consciousness or understanding. The vast majority of them have a set of static "trained parameters" that dictate how they are likely to respond to various stimuli. These parameters are going to be tuned for particular kinds of stimuli. They have no continuous state, no continuous input, and no continuous learning. Every time you submit something to GPT-3, it is just taking that discrete input, sticking it into its neural network, and blindly spitting out what comes out the other end.
I don't know the details of how LaMDA is set up, but I'd guess that it's very similar: it gets discrete inputs and produces outputs that look very much like what a human would say based on them, but it has no internal experience of them. It's not "making decisions", it doesn't have a mood or thoughts or emotions of its own, because that's not how our current generation of AIs work at a fundamental level.
In terms of consciousness and sentience, these AIs aren't just not on the same level as a human: they're not even on the same level as an animal. Even the most basic animal, one that's got no theory of mind or sense of self or anything, is still operating in a continuous feedback loop of input, processing, output, and most animals have enough of what we understand as a mind to be able to continuously learn, and have an internal life of some sort. Watch your dog or cat, and you will be able to see that they have emotions and thoughts, even if they are not thoughts on the same level as our own (most of the time).
AIs have none of this. The entire idea of a current-gen AI "having a clue what it's talking about" is just meaningless, because they have nothing with which to understand it.