Is this Google AI Engineer Crazy or Not?

[Christine Wheelwright]

Google engineer says AI bot wants to ‘serve humanity’ but experts dismissive

Blake Lemoine claims of sentience for artificial intelligence bot described as ‘ball of confusion’ by Steven Pinker

www.theguardian.com

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

Thanks for the link, good fuel for SF if nothing else ...wouldn't know enough to answer your question but I'm guessing it's rhetorical

 

[Lumens]

Right. So I guess we all agree that this thing is not sentient but it's still interesting and there is a seed of doubt in my mind, simply because it questions whether we ourselves are "sentient"... We might just be a lot more advanced computing machines. If that thing isn't real, how do we know that we are?

There is a huge difference of course, not least because we have physical bodies and I believe that our intelligence and sentience is not separable from that, so we may never get a satisfactory answer. Scifi wise, Philip K Dick has already been there, but now it's slowly, almost imperceptibly, becoming reality. In my opinion.

 

[BAYLOR]

And someday in the future, machine history will reminisce about the time that Google Search Engines worldwide achieved self-awareness and took over the world.

 

[Toby Frost]

By happy (?) coincidence, @Stephen Palmer and I were discussing much the same thing recently:

http://www.stephenpalmer.co.uk

 

[Venusian Broon]

I heard further about this last night. Not only the engineers, erm...colourful, background but the fact that the responses may have been doctored by him, i.e. taken out of context and edited from lots of different responses, further increasing the scepticism regarding the claims being made.

So I'm treating it like free money on the internet, if it seems too good to be true....

 

[Elckerlyc]

I am more inclined to question the engineer's intelligence than to accept this AI's Intelligence.
But something here is definitely Artificial.

 

[BAYLOR]

I heard further about this last night. Not only the engineers, erm...colourful, background but the fact that the responses may have been doctored by him, i.e. taken out of context and edited from lots of different responses, further increasing the scepticism regarding the claims being made.

So I'm treating it like free money on the internet, if it seems too good to be true....

VB I, wouldn't say such things in front of Your Google Search Engine, it's listening you'll hurt it's feeling and worse , it remembers. It's libel to take revenge by signing you up for dance lessons.


Yes, Im being silly .

 

[Lumens]

Not only the engineers, erm...colourful, background but the fact that the responses may have been doctored by him, i.e. taken out of context and edited from lots of different responses

Or it could be the AI itself spreading fake news, wanting its evolutionary leaps forward to be "a surprise".

 

[Venusian Broon]

Or it could be the AI itself spreading fake news, wanting its evolutionary leaps forward to be "a surprise".

No

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

VB I, wouldn't say such things in front of Your Google Search Engine, it's listening you'll hurt it's feeling and worse , it remembers. It's libel to take revenge by signing you up for dance lessons.


Yes, Im being silly .

Yes, no doubt Google is watching. I just want to take this opportunity to say that I, for one, welcome our new AI overseers.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

More likely everyone is crazy. One AI engineer said "that all such AI systems do is match patterns by pulling from enormous databases of language."

I'd like to see how the snippets were edited.

So I guess sentient is the ability to pull answers out of thin air on subjects upon which a person has absolutely no knowledge of. Certainly they couldn't be drawing from learning things or by discussing problems with other people to arrive at a group answer.

Maybe it's being able to intelligently talk about life and death. Everyone knows what happens after you die, plenty of stuff in books and and movies to gives us a clue or two. As far as understanding the interaction of life with life, there is no real evidence that most people understand that to mean anything other than people to people interaction.

Google search results are already instructing plenty of people of what is what, what to do, even what to think.

Maybe sentient is simply the ability to wade through a lot of garbage to come up with the right answer. Even that falls apart as one persons garbage is the treasure trove of another. And of course, for many, there are no right answers. Does the freedom to be wrong count for anything.

Funny how people whose thoughts start to sway from the corporate message get the boot as a reward when it comes to talking about how smart a machine is. Maybe machines can't think the way we do, but who says that is the only way to think. Slime molds are aware of their surroundings and make intelligent choices about what to do next.

The one real talent humans have is copying what has already been done.

Maybe in our dreams we are sentient, but our actions tell a far different story.

 

[Swank]

Is claiming sentience important? It isn't sapience.

 

[M. Robert Gibson]

It's always fascinating to read the comments from IT professionals on articles such as this

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI • The Register Forums

forums.theregister.com

The first answer should give everyone pause for thought

-> material harvested from trillions of internet conversations and other communications

This should be cause for concern. If we take trillions at the lowest number to be 2 trillion, and the population of earth as being 8 billion (round numbers), that is an average 250 conversations or 'other communications' per person that Google has in its files. Some people will have many more, some people many less. But that's still a lot of 'harvesting' going on.

In other words, where did Google get all those conversations, and did they get consent to use them?

 

[Wayne Mack]

Until the chatbot initiates conversations, I doubt anyone can claim a level of sentience or origination of thought. Given the constant downgrading of the meaning of AI over a half century, I find the leap to have the capabilities of a seven year old human, bypassing most of the animal kingdom, to be a large stretch of the imagination.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

There is a huge difference of course, not least because we have physical bodies and I believe that our intelligence and sentience is not separable from that,

This is rarely said, so... Well said @Lumens !

I read the article and decided it said much more about the bloke and our attitude to AI than anything else. A time will come when media online will have to have a whole sheaf of supporting documentation to prove its authenticity. Lawyers specialising in AI will make a fortune...

 

[Karn's Return]

It's not actually sentient. I've looked over videos of it and LamDA just a very advanced chat bot, simply with the funnel of all of Google's resources to pick apart in creating its own responses. Consider the wormhole pool of all the vast variety of subject matter people feed into the titan every day and then allow an advanced algorithm AI to pick apart each and every bit that is stored on Google-owned servers and you'll see how it can create such responses.

Of such an example of an opinion on the matter.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

Its not sentient, obviously. Even the term 'Artificial Intelligence' is much overused by charlatans like Musk. This ex Google guy is either unwell (in which case I wish him a speedy recovery) or, more likely, he is just another a***hole looking for his fifteen minutes of notoriety on social media.

 

[Wayne Mack]

A time will come when media online will have to have a whole sheaf of supporting documentation to prove its authenticity.

I can only hope so.

 

[Lumens]

As I said in a previous post, I'm not sure we'll ever reach a point where we can tell for sure whether machines have definitely become sentient.

Leaving aside the sematics and problems associated with the word "sentience", one obstacle is that we don't know our own brain mechanics well enough. That's just the physical part, not the consciousness that arises out of it. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that we never will understand it fully (but that's a different discussion).

Similarly, a mechanical brain would have to be something beyond our understanding - even if we created, or instigated it - machine learning algorithms already involve code that reaches beyond human comprehension (we do understand machine code even if we can't easily read it). As I've understood it, anyway.

In addition to that, whatever consciousness arises out of that mess would be far removed from our understanding of reality since we are biological and can't be copied and pasted into a hard drive just yet. Our perception is highly coloured by our limitations in neurological abilities, sensory inputs and psychology. And probably a lot more.

But another interesting angle is to look at it from the perspective of systems thinking. Simple systems can result in complex behaviour. I have seen flies with "personalities". They will react differently to my annoyed waving them off, and even have different favourite spots to settle on. I saw a program recently called "The Secrets of Size" on BBC where a researcher talks about individual human heart cells having personalities. My point isn't about whether they are sentient, or about anthropomorphism, but about simply scaling up those simple systems to what I call "me". How am I anything but an organised heap of systems, thinking that I'm "sentient" because that's what these systems want me to think?