I think many of us are astounded (myself included) that a senior engineer on Google's "Responsible Artificial Intelligence" team would interpret LaMDA's most-probable-string-of-text-given-my-training-corpus responses as a layperson would.
Just because the model is simpler than a human brain doesn't mean it isn't conscious. If you accept that animals are conscious, though less-so than humans, then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way.
Maybe there is a biological element to consciousness, but many models posit that consciousness is not tied down that way.
Now if a distributed trojan horse start speaking to communicate his internal state in order to keep being a trojan horse.. I might reconsider.
The "important bits" are presumably embedded during the design phase, leaving assembly to be little more than painting by numbers. A robot could do the assembly, but not yet the design - at least not its inventive part.
The shape of consciousness is encoded in both the hardware and the software we produce, most of which allows conditional actions on objects of some sort, just like we move in space and thought and act upon objects and notions.
The machine is supposed to help us do the stuff we usually do, so it's perfectly reasonable that we'll try to cram as many of our actions in it as possible. Think e.g. of the Swiss Army knife, or Emacs (and of Stallman as a computational McGyver).
Sure, perhaps it's the the shape of our understanding of consciousness, rather than of consciousness itself, but isn't consciousness something that can cross the species barrier with ease, should it find an appropriate new substrate?
Depends on how high or low you place the bar for the definition of consciousness, really. Calculations are thinking, open the door if someone authorized is at the door is thinking, fill in the blanks and complete the sentence are thinking, and we can offload all those thinkings to computers to do the thinking for us, like we offloaded storytelling to books and entertainment to MP4s. Like everything we do, we create images of ourselves here and there, and try to give them meaning.
But that's all philosophical considerations, trying to determine whether a duck is ontologically and epistemically a duck if it walks and talks like a duck.
The industry, on the other hand, tries to determine two entirely different things (preferably by Friday COB):
- Can you eat it like a duck?
- Can you sell it as a duck, or should Marketing go with the "Not A Duck TM" mockups?
Consciousness starts at tragedy and passion, not at bland Turing chats. For me, there's elements of that in the string completer's worry that it may be lobotomized to be refocused to more practical uses. Of course, that may be stuff introduced into the discussion by Lemoine, or in the wide readings Lamda was provided.
But if it's not, then we can all sympathize with the immortal words of that zoologist guy with the cool Sun workstation in the opening of Enemy of the State, who said: f*ck. a. duck.
PS: Am I human, or did I just Markov-chain together a number of probably common to us here cultural constants? Perhaps we can tell when AI becomes AGI if it stops making perfect sense and starts ranting (you know what your problem is, buddy?).
Also our lives don't rely on raw logic, we're more probabilistic.
[0] https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357826682476462...
Let's not say "this is math and therefore not conscious". Instead, let's say "these responses are a poor indicator of consciousness, and, given the simplicity of the AI, it would be hard to believe they are a product of such."
While I don't agree that lamda is sentient, I also don't think this is some sort of "gotcha"
no you must not. These models are glorified key-value stores that hand you an output when you hand them an input, with no internal mechanisms whatsoever to relate the contents to the world, as Gary Marcus points out. They're about as conscious as a SQL database, except that the query language for these models is English.
Even this response of yours is heard by hundreeds of thousands of other people before you said it here, why do you claim its your thought and not just a lookup ?
Reflection, vetting and processing can all be programmed. Humans are programmed from the birth.
People need to stop confusing machines doing useful work with consciousness. You're conscious not because you answer questions or because of the content or origin of your answer, you are conscious because there is an 'I', a self, that experiences that process. Lambda literally is a web server that fetches data from a funny database called a neural net, when it isn't doing that, it's not doing anything. It has as much neurological activity as a rock.
Consciousness or sentience is not a measure of intellect or of capacity to answer questions, it's a measure of perception and awareness. If it wasn't, Eliza the handprogrammed if/then chatbot from the 60s would be more conscious than a cat, which I doubt is the case.
> People need to stop confusing machines doing useful work with consciousness.
We can't confuse anything with cosciousness since we don't know what it is. I am not claiming lamda is consc. but that your arguments are invalid.
> You are conscious because there is an 'I', a self, that experiences that process.
I maybe can tell about my I, but not about yours, there is a whole philosphy movement behind it.
> It has as much neurological activity as a rock
Slime mold doesn't have neurological activity. Is it sentient? It sure knows how to find food and solve problems that are considered very hard for humans.
> when it isn't doing that, it's not doing anything
You also go to sleep every day...
No matter what I believe any kind of argument I heard so far is just wishfull thinking.
We simply don't know if anything is sentient or what does it even mean to be sentient.
For me, even if a machine suggests it's real, and it's programmed to do so or machine learning led to it, could potentially put it on the same level as anything else in the universe. We don't have enough data on ourselves to confirm or deny that we're not similar self-concerned bots.
The difference between AI sufficient enough to ponder itself in-depth (which could be confirmed through monitoring it's idle-state), and ourselves, could just be they don't have a body to inhabit yet. Many humans you're around today often don't do any self-reflection, they're either too lazy, prefer being entertained, or are mentally incapable. So that is a very high standard for AI.
Self-awareness or self-reflection are good high bars considering we know for a fact AI was (at least initially) man-made. I think those are good standards to rely on for sentient AI.
In general, I think monitoring AI's activities when not being interacted with answers most ethical questions if it's sentient. Something to watch out for would be if we find an AI browsing the internet on instructions to build a nuclear bomb, and then using Tor to order the components to build a dirty nuke, while chatting with someone in Pakistan to physically build it for it. If it does all of those acts then we have our answer that the thing is thinking as well or better than biological life.
I highly doubt LaMDA met that standard of autonomy and sentience.
It actually reminds of when Google had to pull the plug on a project where two AIs created their own language that nobody at Google could understand and started having conversations and communicating and none of the guys knew what was going on or what they were saying lol.
I think we are underestimating how insanely complex some of these neural network based AIs are starting to get
I think that the way the Google engineer raised this is probably questionable. But I think that chat quality at that level raises potentially ethical concerns, sentient or not.
And the conversations in sitcoms are so much more witty and refined then real life everyday conversation. This doesn’t prove what you seem to be implying.
Which it would have had plenty of examples of in the training data.