I cannot see anything that remotely makes these two contexts architecturally, practically, or ethically similar, except in the narrow sense of query responses that might have been mistakenly thought of as defining sentience in earlier decades.
My argument is just that:
- Sentience is variable. We might regard primitive organisms as biological machines. As some of these machines have slowly evolved to become more complex, sentience/consciousness has emerged, effectively by 'redesigning' and scaling the same hardware. It is an emergent property. At the same time this has been happening, other aspects of what we call intelligence have been developing.
- Artificial networks being scaled, are also displaying emergent behaviours, some of which overlap with aspects of intelligence. This does not imply they are sentient, but it does strongly support some previous assumptions that sentience, like intelligence, is emergent and hence there will be no better answer coming.
There's very clear definitions for sentience & sapience.
The only confusion is that laypeople tend to conflate sentience & sapience.
A sentient AI is not necessarily a sapient one, by definition.
This leads to believing that GPT has solved many of these issues.
Of course that's not a criticism of the ML achievement, except that everyone and their mother has started making some extreme arguments about the thing.
> language enables intelligence
In his research, he argues that it’s the other way around; we have an innate intelligence for acquiring language.
To put it another way, language has made us more knowledgeable (because it’s a great mechanism for building and transferring context), but intelligence or aptitude for language was present before we developed languages.
Does this align with how your views were reshaped post LLMs?
> language enables intelligence
was just a poor choice of words here. i understood GP as "the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language"[0]