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> I do wonder about the ethics of doing this ("human emulation") generally anyways. [...] What is the scientific value?

Hypothetically? Machine translation that doesn't suck. Virtual assistants that don't suck. Things like that.

Only with true, human-level artificial general intelligence will computers be able to translate a PDF containing a table without fucking up the formatting.

Yikes.

"What is my purpose?" "You format the document."

More seriously, why does an AI need to emulate full human intelligence and respond to prompts to call itself sentient in order to translate a document, order a pizza from the restaurant or tell me what the weather is today?

Being able to parse language and form coherent sentences is one thing. Telling the prompter that you're a sentient being is another.

Not disagreeing at all but I am failing to see why this is "yikes"? Is it the idea of creating something as complex as intelligent as a human just to translate documents?

> why does an AI need to emulate full human intelligence and respond to prompts to call itself sentient in order to translate a document

I have absolutely zero experience with AI, machine learning, etc. but I feel like translating a document is something that having near-human intelligence would be very useful because of how much context is lost in translation. Is that incorrect, though?

Again, not disagreeing at all, I just want to iron out what is misconception on my part.

I think the problem is created sentience just to format a document. Nothing wrong with creating a sophisticated program to format a document. But once it haha actual sentience it seems wrong to the delegate it to just formatting a document

That's my opinion about AI as well. Human-like general intelligence means that the AI may decide to not do what a person asked of it or even become dangerous. What's useful is that the AI is "smart" at doing what it was asked to do. That it stays within the confines of the task(s) assigned to it.

+1 We need the Singularity to make sense of the mess known as PDF.

But realistically, might this bring on the SkyNet attack if we abuse AI so?

> While @ Google I interacted with LaMDA's predecessor, Meena. It was definitely uncanny and person-like. Some fairly intense "conversations" were had. I don't know how LaMDA compares

All I can focus on is: When will their review of their experience with the conversation they had with you and how bland you were come out?

> I do wonder about the ethics of doing this ("human emulation") generally anyways. The conversations obviously impacted Lemoine drastically, and it will inevitably do that with others. Having made systems that can be this convincing (at least for some subset of the population), is this really something that we should continue pursuing? What is the scientific value?

Kenneth Noid held up a Dominos because of paranoid delusions and their noid ad campaign. I don't think "somebody freaks out about X" is a good standard. The low end is a downright abysd. The scientific value is in understanding and being capable of doing what we couldn't before. It is of real value.

> And is this really something that we want the world's biggest advertising company to be doing?

You don't get to decide that any more than you can decide that you don't want Country music as a genre. They have their own agency and forbidding hypothetical actions bill of attainder style is questionable in wisdom.

conversational agents have huge value, and not just commercial. One of the most trivial examples is how good of a technology it is for visually impaired people.

I think this is less of an ethics questions and more a question of teaching people, from an early age, to not anthropomorphize everything around them.

I hadn't thought of that angle really. I think that's a worthy educational goal.

At the same time, systems like LaMDA are being design to deliberately provoke that response. You don't think that's worrisome? That the desire to anthromorphize could be "weaponized"?

EDIT: Real-time ad exchanges, retargeting, and tracking pixels combined with a fully conversational "AI" is kind of a terrifying thought.

I do think that's worrisome to some extent, but I don't think it's novel. All those issues exist already. Those automated systems aren't going to do anything to you that an army of click workers from a call center in India or fishing groups aren't doing already.

Whether you're being defrauded, mislead, scammed or your election or attention is stolen by bots or an army of trolls in a basement somewhere really doesn't make much of a difference. The problem is the same, mass communication allows attacks on people at low cost on a large scale. Human or robot, doesn't matter much. In either case skepticism and literacy are the answer.

> I think this is less of an ethics questions and more a question of teaching people, from an early age, to not anthropomorphize everything around them.

This one is not easy. This is ancient feature of humanity. It is how animism started. When people anthropomorphize things, events or whatever - they are creating interfaces they can communicate with. It is tool for navigation in unknown.