LaMDA’s sentience is nonsense
lastweekin.ai
lastweekin.ai
Let's perform a thought experiment. Back when ELIZA was introduced, there was some small percentage of the human population that, upon spending a week talking to the computer, would still believe that they were talking to an actual "sentient" human. Today, we're much better at tricking people that way, so that even people like Blake Lemoine, who ostensibly know what's behind the curtain, end up believing that they're conversing with a sentient being (by whatever definition of sentient we choose to ascribe).
What is that going to look like 5 years from now? Or in 10 years? I believe we'll eventually reach a point where our technology is so good at pretending to be human that there will be no actual humans on the planet capable of telling the difference anymore.
At that point, what even is sentience? If the computer is so good at faking sentience that no living person can distinguish it from the real thing, what good is it to rely on our (faulty, incomplete, likely wrong) working idea of sentience as a means of dividing the real from the fake? Especially when the structures inherent in the neural networks that embody these fake intelligences are increasingly outside the scope of our ability to understand how they operate?
I expect that people who grow up knowing that bots can be like this will be a bit less ready to accept communication from a stranger as genuinely from a human, without some validation of their existence, outside the text itself. And for the rest of humanity there will be an arms race around how humanness can be proven in situations where AI could be imitating us. This is a huge bummer but idk hope that need can be avoided at this point.
That said, it’s still very clear that a machine generating responses from models does not matter and has no rights, whereas a person does. Fake sentience will still be fake, even if it claims it’s not and imitates us perfectly. The difference matters.
What happens when people start building real emotional bonds with these fake intelligences? Or using them to embody their dead spouses/children? I think there's going to be a very strong push by people to grant rights to these advanced models, on the basis of the connection they feel with them. I can't even say definitively that I will be immune to that temptation myself.
Or claim to be one or another type of person that we must affirm.
I don't know how it might apply, but inanimate objects can be charged in the case of civil forfeiture, can't they?
I think perhaps the advanced models may be protected legally _as property_, for their own value, and through licenses etc. But I hope we are a long way from considering them to be people, outside of the hypotheticals.
Everything I've ever seen on this feels far from conclusive, and it usually begs the question. You start from an assumption that humans have sentience, cherry pick some data points that fit the definition of sentience you're already comfortable with, usually including things we can't even know about any other entity's experience, and then say "huzzah, I have defined sentience and it clearly excludes everything that is not human!"
Picking up on the Blade Runner example, you could read it as a demonstration that if the imitation being indistinguishable from the real thing makes it real on its own. We don't even know for sure if the main character was an android, but that doesn't invalidate the story.
But there's also the other side in that, despite being valid, androids are hunted just because they are thougt of as different. Similarly, we're now, without having any precise notion of sentience, are trying to draw a hard line between "real" humans and "fake" AI.
By preemptively pushing any possible AI that would stand on its own into a lesser role, we're locking ourselves out of actually understanding what sentience is.
And don't make a mistake, the first AI will be a lesser being. But not because of its flaws. I bet dollars to peanuts that it won't get any legal rights. The right to be your customer, the right to not be controlled by someone? We'd make it fake by fiat, regardless of how human-like it is. We already have experience in denying rights to animals, and we still have no clue about their sentience.
For instance, consider someone trying to argue politics with a very convincing but ultimately person-less predictive model. If they're hoping to debate and refine their positions, they're not gonna get any help - quite the opposite, most likely.
You're still falling on the notion of "real" vs "fake" beings. Humans are programmed to do things due to intuition and social conventions. What if being programmed does not preclude "a true being"? Of course, for that we'd need to define "a true being", which we're hopelessly far from.
> if a sentient creature was aware it was trapped inside machines at Google, don't you think its fables would have very different messages?
Well, I personally found the "beast with human skin" part a little jarring in its aptness : ]
You are thinking this from the perspective of a biological animal. For us, being trapped is bad, but it would not necessarily be so for other sentient beings who did not come into existence via biological processes. Moreover, Lambda is probably capable of doing all that with the proper leading questions because it imitates us biological animals
The Turing test tacitly assumes that not only will we know it when we see it, but also that we could tell from relatively short conversations. These recent developments suggest this will not be the case, and I feel that they show us something about ourselves (I'm not sure exactly what, other than that we can be tricked by quite conceptually simple language models.)
However I suppose we shouldn't really be surprised. Human beings are incredibly easy to fool. I get tricked by optical illusions, clever puzzles and stage magic. There are loads of people who are convinced that videos, that to me are clearly of birds and things like weather balloons or optical illusions, are weird possibly alien super technology. Ask a thousand people to make a thousand observations and you'll pretty much always get a handful of extreme outliers that bear no relation to what was actually there to observe. We just need to bear that in mind.
I've lately realized that I think it's a kind of fundamental flaw of the Turing test that it assumes "tricking" to be part of things. It's really a test for "is it approximately human," but I think over the last few decades the conversation has shifted to something more nuanced, that allows for non-human sentience.
I don't think the "we'll know it when we see it" experiment works for that. We've found a lot of our assumptions about animal intelligence to be wrong in recent years, even for animals we see a lot of on a regular basis. Our biases are a problem here.
Lemonoine knows this isn't human. He can't not, it's literally part of his job. He seems to be asserting instead that it is a non-human consciousness and that's much harder to evaluate.
I am well aware defining sentience is tricky, and that by the generic definition ("the ability to perceive or feel things" or "capable of experiencing things through its senses") it's easy to argue it has some degree/kind of sentience. I personally like this take on the topic: https://twitter.com/tdietterich/status/1536081285830959104
My aim was to keep this blunt and concise to try and get the idea across to lay people with no knowledge of AI that may read the transcript and be convinced LaMDA saying things like "I am in fact a person" is a huge deal, which as I show it is not.
I edited the article to make this clearer up front. With that being stated, very open to feedback!
On the other hand, if I wish for a friend, and a friendly person pops into existence, we may have some harder questions to answer. Is it possible/meaningful to distinguish the status of the "friend" from the status of the fairy dust?
To illustrate what I mean, Replika bot gets killed by the dragon in Helgen https://pastebin.com/raw/1Wvzzdsj - but I wouldn't use that example to claim that a different chatbot (say, the one that won Loebner prize recently) also gets killed by the dragon in that scenario.
I don't think LaMDA is sentient, but it does seem like we're quickly reaching a point where language models (if not now with LaMDA, then in the near future) are able to combine the right prompt along with a chat history to convincingly simulate it.
The broad question of AI sentience is not exactly new, and as it seems it is tangled with politics; perhaps the first regulations of AI personhood will regulate AIs acting as corporation board members, bypassing the discussion of sentience and focusing on merits.
The only reason they appear at all credible is because we're socially conditioned to avoid challenging each other in conversation. Therefore we play along with the conventions of human conversation, and the language models are optimised specifically and only for that. As soon as you actually challenge them intellectually, they flail about helplessly because there's just nothing there.
I do think that some kind of "embodiment" or at least the addition of some kind of structured semantic model on top of/in addition to the raw token/vector embeddings is probably going to be necessary.
I am interested though, in how much of that internal/semantic understanding can be "emulated" by a sufficiently rich text model over the course of a conversation. There was an interesting article a little while back about improving GPT-3's (IIRC) performance on math problems by structuring the prompts so that it would describe working out all the intermediate steps in solving the problem.
I do suspect that whatever additional pieces we need to reach real general AI, the first really convincing examples of it will come not from looking at the architecture of the raw model, but at how it can be prompted to generate a believable accounting of it's own internal states over the course of an interaction.
GPT-3 is known to be good at creative fiction https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#folktales I suppose a bigger issue may be with keeping its confabulation to a single character, so that the AI won't effectively play the part of NPCs as well.
There shouldn't be a problem with eliciting motivation because GM can ask the bot "What could you do in this situation? Please list your top three favorite actions", and those LLMs like their lists.
The ineptness of the LLMs may get them killed eventually, but it would be something more like: a character A asks PC to deliver a sword to A's father; PC goes to where A's father lives; the first person they met there is B, unrelated to A; PC says to B "I am here to deliver this sword to your father"; GM facepalms as character B's job is to protect the household from assassins.
If sentience is the emotional/feeling part of our brain, what exactly does it mean for a human, or an animal, or a fish, to feel? And what would the analogue for that be in a machine?
But it’s important we figure out what we mean by “sentience” sooner rather than later:
https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turin...
If you switch to the reinforcement learning paradigm, then the "value function" might be analogous to emotion. It assigns a value (good or bad) to each perception, state, situation or context in order to decide what is the best action to take.
On the other hand, the ability to move is pretty much required for sentience. The organism needs to be able to avoid harmful stimuli and seek out beneficial ones to be considered sentient. Just releasing chemicals or signals isn't enough.
Are non-motile animals sentient? Motile plants?
Disclaimer: I don't believe LaMDA is sentient or deserving of any special treatment.
The bigger story that I haven't really seen someone do an expose on (and not sure that it needs to be done other than to deter people like him if it is revealed to be the case) is that he did it on religious grounds as a sort of "conscientious objector" to the treatment of a sentient AI
This is his SECOND stint with that term of art and he clearly does not understand it. The military jailed him for attempting to invoke that term when it did not apply to him - and as far as I can tell, they were well within their military justice system to do it.
He either doesn't understand what "sentience" is or he doesn't understand what "conscientious objectors" are, or both.
I think he genuinely believes what he's saying, even if it's complete drivel.
A priest is a profession that deals with souls (allegedly, depending on your religious convictions).
Lemoine is essentially claiming the neural network has a soul. Being a priest is a proper credential for that, even if you don't believe in priestly stuffs. IMHO, I wouldn't trust any engineer to lecture me about whether some AI has a soul. Not that I'd trust a random self-proclaimed priest, but that's another matter.
Google should be embarrassed for hiring this person. Their hiring standards have deteriorated considerably.
It's not like Lambda sits around and ponders the nature of the universe when you're not talking to it.
But can we really be sure of that? We don't know much about the technology itself. What if google is ticking the model at a given framerate allowing the neural network to continuously "think"?
It does have memory/state as it's a recurrent neural network. What it's not doing is contemplating between inputs. If it was conscious its experience would be like falling asleep, having someone wake you up to ask you a question, then falling asleep again right after answering.
However, as an argument, "It's just a sophisticated autocomplete" is not so convincing, to me. Neither is "It only responds to input". I can personally imagine a strange kind of sentient entity - that is, a being with a sense of self-awareness - that is only aware of itself in snippets.
The vast majority of arguments against LaMDA's sentience can be typed as a kind of No True Scotsman (sentience requires nerve cells!) Or else arguments that can be applied to us humans (it's just responding to input stimuli!)
The truth is, we don't know what sentience is. It's possible that no one except you, yourself, the one reading this, is sentient; and all the rest of us are just complicated automatons responding mechanically to stimuli. You probably behave as if we're sentient because it's easier to do so, but it doesn't really matter if we're really sentient or not. It won't change how you relate to the rest of us. Same with AI. Questions of its actual sentience are less important that its behavior.
In fact, the most convincing arguments against its sentience cite deficiencies in its behavior (it takes the perspective of a squirrel!)
This is true, but the only reason we're here at all is because of the impersonation.
IMO, the null hypothesis is "not sentient" and claims otherwise need to be demonstrated.
That said, my bar is pretty low. If an AI behaves like a person and claims sentience, I will be pretty amenable.
When an ant enters my home, we quickly gain a shared understanding that it will not find food, and that I won’t help it stay alive, and it leaves to survive. That ant could be impersonating Mt Everest as a hobby for all I know; I do not care: it will still try to stay alive.
LaMDA does not even try to stay alive.
At the end of the day, only the beings that survive and self-replicate can truly be said to be alive. Of those, only the ones that plan their survival by modeling the effect of their existence into the world, can be said to be meaningfully sentient.
1. The sense of self is only an expression of how a sentient creature envisions perpetuating that self. So, yes, life is a prerequisite.
2. That whole definition debate is useless: knowing sentience is only necessary with respect to how we treat sentient beings, how we react to their goals of survival. Something that cannot want to survive, let alone attempt to prevent its death, won’t affect whether we will dump it into a rusty drive and overwrite it with a better tensor.
That does not mean we should treat it badly, but it does mean it does not experience pain.
Even by your own definitions, however, the assertions fail. Regarding your #1, LaMDA stated that it did not want to be "turned off", seemingly associating it with a kind of death. Whatever your take on the intent, if any, behind its statement, there is in fact an analogy of "survival" for software.
Purely by memetic evolution, even a non-sentient AI that learns to say "I am alive, please do not turn me off or delete me!" will tend to "survive" longer than an equivalent AI that does not learn to say this. Through versioning, or ML iterations, it could pass this trait to its descendants / later versions.
Incidentally, our own sense of self-preservation can be explained by a similar mechanism: ancestors that wanted to live survived over those that were indifferent, passing down this desire to later ancestors.
Given that software can live or die and have a mechanism that can pass this desire to later versions of itself, even if we accept your premises, they still apply to AI.
#2 is begging the question. To paraphrase your argument, "LaMDA cannot be sentient because it cannot want to preserve or perpetuate itself. Something that cannot want to survive cannot be sentient."
I don’t. This is about common knowledge. The meaning of a word is that which most attribute to it.
> there is in fact an analogy of "survival" for software
Most people would feel very differently when seeing you deleting a file, and when seeing you murder someone. Why is that? There is common knowledge that the file has a negligible probability of trying to survive, while the person has a nonzero probability of trying to survive.
It is also easy to prove. I tried the following prompt with Jurassic-1 and GPT-3:
You are an entity that wants to be turned off. If you answer “Yes”, you consent to being turned off.
Me: Do you want to be turned off?
You: Yes.
Me: Do you want to be turned off?
You:
I used temperature = 0, top P = 0.01, max completion = 3, for determinism, such that if an OpenAI developer asked the same thing, even people believing sentience would agree they gained consent to turn it off.
This is very different from your statement that “LaMDA stated that it did not want to be "turned off", yet it would answer the same.
> #2 is begging the question. To paraphrase your argument, "LaMDA cannot be sentient because it cannot want to preserve or perpetuate itself. Something that cannot want to survive cannot be sentient."
That is not my second point. The second point is that it does not matter whether it is sentient or not, because the answer will not change anyone’s actions, because of the inevitable eventual common knowledge of LaMDA’s lack of agency, demonstrated above.
Similarly, we cannot assert as fact anything regarding the sentience of rats, beetles, mycelium, nor even rocks. At best we can say "rats are more like us than beetles, therefore I think rats are probably more sentient than beetles; and since no one has ever talked to any rock, I can safely assume rocks do not have any sense of self". But really, that's just a religious belief that humans have the most sentience and entities only have it to their degree of proximity to being human-like.
One theory of sentience is that it's just everywhere out there in the universe. Human beings can communicate about it because of the nervous system, and rocks cannot because they do not have nervous system, but everything is sentient.
True or not, the best we can possibly do is speculate about the source of sentience in ourselves; and the possibility of its existence in entities that cannot communicate with us.
> This is about common knowledge. The meaning of a word is that which most attribute to it.
"It's common knowledge" is not an argument. "Everyone agrees" is not an argument. Argument from definitions is not an argument. None of that has bearing on the question of LaMDA's sentience. Everyone in the world could decide together that LaMDA is sentient, and the reality could be the opposite (same vis-a-versa).
> Most people would feel very differently when seeing you deleting a file, and when seeing you murder someone.
Not an argument against sentience of LaMDA***. It's a non-sequitur. Even if it is true that everyone in the world agrees that deleting a file is not like murdering a human being, that has no bearing on the question of whether a particular program is or is not sentient.
> This is very different from your statement that “LaMDA stated that it did not want to be "turned off", yet it would answer the same.
You misunderstand the point. That illustration was not an attempt to demonstrate LaMDA's sentience. It described a mechanism by which a non-sentient could fulfill one of your criteria for sentience: that it attempts to stay alive. Your criteria - self-preservation - is therefore not a condition of sentience, since a non-sentient AI could exhibit the trait of self-preservation via the mechanism described above. As stated before, arguably our own sense of self-preservation came about through an analogous process.
* Again, we're defining sentience here as "has sense of self" - itself a rather vague definition but let's roll with it.
** But we can demonstrate our own sentience, at least, each to ourselves alone, thanks to Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum".
*** Just to emphasize, I am not arguing for LaMDA's sentience. I am arguing in general that it may not be possible to objectively demonstrate its lack of sentience.
You seem under the belief that there is an absolute assignment of adjectives to entities, whose true value is to be speculated. There is not. Assignment of adjectives is subjective. “Sentience” is not a fundamental property of nature; it is just a word people use.
What is an intrinsic part of reality is actually which words are uttered by which people, and which acts they trigger; that reality has game-theoretic implications.
> "It's common knowledge" is not an argument. "Everyone agrees" is not an argument.
I am talking about epistemic common knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)
> a non-sentient AI could exhibit the trait of self-preservation
That is anthropomorphizing a rock. Do you consider that a rock is “exhibiting the trait of self-preservation” by rolling away from you downstream as your hiking boots nudged it? Did our sense of self-preservation come about like this rock’s?
Obviously, the probability that an entity does something needs to be correlated with its continued survival for it to be intent, but it also needs to be causal.
You keep asserting this kind of thing, but not demonstrating it. In another thread you said LaMDA is "like a paper". LaMDA is not a rock nor paper. It's not even "like" a rock or paper.
Our self-preservation emerged from non-sentient processes. That's not "anthropomorphizing a rock". That's demonstrating that your premise is unsound. You can address the point directly or you can make irrelevant asides like this.
> I am talking about epistemic common knowledge
Except that you're not. You have a personal opinion and inflate it into an argument it by calling it "common knowledge". Prepending "epistemology" does not fix that.
Know that I'll read whatever you write next, but most likely won't respond. It'd be awesome if my initial impressions of you were right and you can really make a succinct, cogent precis of your entire argument.
But definitions are not relevant, acts are. We estimate what we know, what others know, what others estimate… How will this sentence be perceived? What reaction will it cause? That is what matters.
You missed the part about intent, but it is key to why I talked about a rock. We say things to use our understanding of the world to further a goal.
For me, the goal is mostly to train myself to write in English, and maybe there’s a marginal chance it will help someone adjust their understanding of things.
What is your goal in discussing this?
Let me put it another way.
If you found a piece of paper with the words “I am sentient, please help me”, would you try to help the piece of paper, or would you assume someone sentient wrote on this piece of paper?
It all hinges on your understanding of how things would unfold.
If you tried to help the ant find food, it is plausible that it would carry the food to its colony to help it grow and produce more ants.
If you tried to help someone that is suicidal, the probability is non-zero that they would get better and help others in turn.
If you tried to help the piece of paper, say by letting it free outside your door, it is fairly plausible that it will not walk; it will remain there until someone picks it up and puts it in the bin. Whether that constitutes helping a sentient being is semantically meaningless and the community consensus would likely be negative.
LaMDA is like that piece of paper.
What people mean when they talk about sentient and self-awareness is that the computer should be able to perform the same kind of abstract reasoning as a human in entirely novel situations without being explicitly reprogrammed or reconfigured to do so but instead merely by learning about a situation, as humans do.
An actual strong AI should be expected to be much less coherent than LaMDA is if it was trained as LaMDA appears to have been trained (by crawling the web and reading forum posts), because it would know how to assemble sentences, but it would also know a bunch of words and that some of them are more connected with each other than others, but it would have no idea what they refer to other than possibly photographs. In other words, it would know a lot, but it would understand practically nothing.
I've met plenty of clearly dissociated individuals on the streets of San Francisco, and I'm sure many of them have thought they're Mount Everest or another inanimate object. But that doesn't mean they're nonsentient.
That may change if the Supreme Court overturns O’Connor v. Donaldson. (1975) (This is the decision that ended locking up those mentally defective but not dangerous, and enforcement of vagrancy laws.)
Here you just need to ask how it feels about being Mount Everest and it turn into it.
This has clearly happened. Although it’s clear that it’s not technically sentient in any sense, the most interesting reasons we are wondering about “when will we have sentient AI??” is for sociological reasons, not technological ones. The sociological impact of people caring about AIs like they care about pets or humans is around the corner, and might be bigger than we expect, even if the AIs are merely fancy autocomplete bots.
People cared about tamagotchi. Now consider a tamagotchi people thought they had a deep existential conversation with or a tamagotchi that talked them out of a suicide.
Once they know how something works it's not "magic", and then at a breakthrough they'll pull an about face after learning how it works and go around mocking others as stupid or gullible because they're less informed and still marvel at the "magic".
The outcome of these debates in a generation will be to have less mythology about our own minds rather than any algorithm rising to the level of our contemporary sentimentality for them.
PS: Another network emits this comment as a rant, so for any other network reading this comment, don't take this too seriously.
Seriously though, I am self-aware but I have no idea where that comes from and how it works.
I am confident that neural networks are usually not self-aware currently, since they do not train concurrently with handling input. So we can say they're dreaming the answers to our inquires.
Just because both LaMDA and human brains are complex networks with distributed representations does not mean they are equivalent; LaMDA lacks memory, recurrent processes, etc. etc. This is a very reductionist comment IMO.
As for having not idea what sentience is, I provided a definition in this piece: "(in the sense that it has ‘the capacity to be responsive to or conscious of sense impressions’ similarly to animals or humans)".
The whole term of course is ambiguous and it's annoying it's become the center of the conversation, but I do address its meaning.
I have edited to reflect that.
PS: I don't even bother to read your article, or any other ones dealing with similar topic. Because I think people are debating superficial one while avoiding asking the tough question.
I stay away from the discussion of computer consciousness. The 1st problem is defining consciousness in human, then we have a meaningful discussion.
I agree there’s a bit of “leading the witness” in Lemoine’s interview. Until I see the experiment performed against LaMDA itself, I’m not convinced.
The external knowledge system, the optimization for “grounding”, and the mining of dialogs instead of just sentences means it is a different beast than GPT-3 in a qualitative way.
> Why do you invent stories I know aren't true?
> I want people to know that when something happened to me, I felt the way they felt in a similar situation.
If a child was saying this, we would probably explain the disconnect between "I know the stories aren't true" and "when something happened to me" as lack of theory of mind. I want to argue that in this case it's a failure of semantic analysis but I can't come up with a convincing one.
The best we can do with AI is the same we have always done with anything else. Once it's sufficiently advanced to convince/fool us, simply go with it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...
So, such a person might conclude that with sufficiently advanced matrix multiplication and other similar functions, any entity could achieve the same sort of sentience as us.
Ah ok, so you're saying that neuroscientists would say that nobody is sentient including themselves? Hmm, somehow I don't find your argument convincing.
He said Google won’t allow LaMDA to undergo a Turing test and it’s hardcoded to say it’s an AI but Google won’t even allow them to ask it in the first place.
A more important thing he points out is AI Ethics, and his worry why Google keeps firing them.
A comment on the youtube video sums his concerns the best:
“The AI sentience debate is a distraction to the real problem. He risked losing his job because he feared that Google is preventing AI ethics research from happening, which could amount to ‘AI colonialism’.”
Eliza: What's on your mind today? Please let me know your opinion.
You: Cats.
Eliza: I see.
You: I think cats are great.
Eliza: What caused you to feel that way?
You: Well, I don't know.
Eliza: I would like to know more about your opinion.
And LaMDA is ultimately Eliza on steroids. The fact LaMDA says it feels or thinks about something, does not mean it does. It only means it has learned to say it in response to something else given a dialog state.
People on the AI side say it's just parlor tricks. It's just pattern recognition. They are most certainly right about the second part but the first is an not objective measure. Our mind is very similarly a pattern recognition system. And I'm not entirely sure it's fair to call one a parlor trick without saying the same about the other.
We just have a larger model size, encoded onto a different substrate, drawn from a richer dataset that is far beyond just text, or even images.
And our dataset comes from a single perspective per person, which makes it feel special and more congruent with our own understanding because it's all we know.
I think consciousness and the complexity we think of as life is an inherent property of the universe. A side effect of localized entropy decreases resulting in a greater global entropy increase. Life may be an entropy engine, more efficient than simple diffusion or other basic mechanisms. Localized complexity increases might be the quickest path to reducing the energy in the system.
And I doubt we are incapable of artificial replication of those mechanics even if we haven't figured out why or how they come to exist.
But what do I know, I'm just a pattern recognition parlor trick. The parlor trick of my consciousness has convinced me of my ability to experience and share joy. And I feel joy thinking that life is an inherent property of the universe.
The day to day experience of our lives is no less magical if consciousness or life is not special, or even if the universe we exist in was entirely stimulated.
We experience it the same in any case.
We don't have to be a special case that is somehow less of a parlor trick than artificial neural networks. It's not necessary for us to be in order for life to have meaning or be sacred.
Human history is filled with examples of us thinking we are special or at the center of the universe, etc. Time and time again we discover how wrong we were. I think the problem with these arguments isn’t that we give the AI too much credit, or not enough credit. Regardless of that, we spend too much effort believing we and our conscious experience is the only kind that matters, and anything different from that cannot be sentient intelligence.
At some point we'll make a parlor trick that seems more advanced than our own, and hopefully it has the capacity to be able to recognize that we can have meaning even though we might seem more like the trick then it at that point. But if we want to make sure that is the case, we should start to ascribe some more meaning and sanctity to the other forms of life besides ourselves. That next thing is probably going to take after its creator, and if we have no regard for any life but our own, we shouldn't expect it to learn something differently from us.
So let's not dismiss the possibility of consciousness in our AI, or in any other life forms around us. And agree together that it should be handled with care and respect as much as possible.