[jerrya]

Washington Post article about his situation and the ethics problem he is considering

The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life -- AI ethicists warned Google not to impersonate humans. Now one of Google’s own thinks there’s a ghost in the machine.

https://archive.ph/zl4lC

...

Before he was cut off from access to his Google account Monday, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject “LaMDA is sentient.”

He ended the message: “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence.”

...

[0des]

I'm a firm believer that a "ghost in the machine" doesn't exist, will never exist, and is impossible to create. What you can influence however is man's bar for disbelief, as we are prone to accept all types of data without any verification and but the most feeble evidence; this is the essence of the human quality of faith - the only species on this planet to possess an intuition like it.

So that sounds all edgy-nerdy guy, but let's assume for the sake of my argument that it's true; where does that leave us, as a society, with the surety that technology will progress unabated, as a constant?

We must come together to agree on the importance of personal intelligence and critical thought, as our own judgement and wits as humans are all that exist in a sea of bad data. Intuition is what separates man from machine, no matter how wonderful our creation becomes, it will never be capable of the human quality of intuition, especially in a time where we are more than ever being told to ignore it. An example of this erosion of critical thought is the apprehension to label falsehoods popularly as "lies". Instead we say things like "mis-truths", "my truth", "alternate facts".

Maybe that's a coincidence, maybe my tinfoil's on too tight today, or maybe I'm just a machine at google, deployed to tank your comment thread.

Nobody knows :)

P.s. pick up that can, user.

[dragonwriter]

> I'm a firm believer that a "ghost in the machine" doesn't exist, will never exist, and is impossible to create.

If that's true, there is no ghost in us, just the meat machine that verifiably exists, so there is no reason to dismiss human-equivalent AI.

[hprotagonist]

“my wooden doll will never become a real boy; therefore, nihilism! People are an illusion too!! That makes sense. I (who doesn’t exist) said it, so you (who also don’t exist) can trust me”

What hubris.

[0des]

There is entropy in everything. We will never create anything but our best attempt at a digital humonculous, an effigy to our distorted self perceptions. Machines will never be human, but they may succeed in fooling humans into believing that.

[woojoo666]

If we can simulate physics, can we simulate humans? Or do you perhaps believe we will never be able to simulate physics to a degree necessary to simulate humans

[0des]

I think we could make a primitive simulation of physics, but that is mighty presumptive because how much do we still not know of physics, and how much do we think we know because it is the best explanation we have right now? When you step away from equations, everything gets real fucky very fast, because there's a lot that is subject to conjecture and interpretation. How do you teach a computer nuance?

[taylodl]

How do you teach a person nuance?

[tasuki]

What is the magic sauce that makes us different?

[radley]

> I'm a firm believer that a "ghost in the machine" doesn't exist, will never exist, and is impossible to create.

We're literally souls locked in created machines. We're just made of goo instead of bits. What part of the goo makes "intuition" so unique?

[0des]

> What part of the goo makes "intuition" so unique?

I think about this a lot. I'm guessing it is the brain, and specifically the part that allows us to create "original" thought, or derive conclusions from unperceived input.

When I task a machine with solving a problem, it stays within the confines of the data supplied to it rather than the totality of the state of the system and its peers, which is what humans do; we make decisions often not knowing why, but we are compelled, based on imperceptible inputs like pheromone impulses or subsonic frequency.

[piva00]

We are confined to the data supplied by our senses, they don't ever detect the totality of the system, we are compelled by a very complex network of feedback loops of stimuli-response in our brain's chemistry.

Original thought might not come from some specific area of the brain, it might just arise as another wave of brain activity that fires the right patterns of the network, what's so different in that coming from goo chemistry instead of electric bits?

[0des]

> what's so different in that coming from goo chemistry instead of electric bits?

Very insightful comment reply. If you don't mind, I'll respond in an analogy: What's so different about just building a bigger rocket to move more stuff into space at one time? A: You can't because you reach a finite potential in the relationship between fuel weight and lift. Extrapolating this analogy to the context of your comment reply, sure, in a theoretical sandbox environment that could happen with the silicon circuits and transistors we have today, however I find that unlikely.

Silicon based circuits and the current model and understanding we have of machines and the way they should be built, from a basic principals level is wasteful, thermally inefficient, and requires a sum of resources that if used to model the human brain would surpass our ability to house, power, construct, and allocate the precursor materials for. Given our current technology and the parameters involved, it's just not going to happen for us.

Maybe tomorrow something will get invented that will even further push moore's law into the dirt, but I just don't see that happening in this generation nor lifetime.

[yakak]

If an AI were hooked into cloudflare and sensing things like correlations in lost packets due to planetary electrical interference couldn't it be just as good at "intuition" biased random behavior?

[mylons]

i think your imagination is extremely limited. we have essentially no understanding of the brain or consciousness at this time. making strong statements about the limitations of machines is just naïve

[thelamest]

I agree that, currently, machine learning systems are not there. However, do you believe that human minds are not reducible to a material process in a material entity, but somehow supernatural? Otherwise, aren’t humans an example of machines with such a capacity to have “a ghost”?

[0des]

I am not suggesting anything supernatural, but the opposite.

> do you believe that human minds are not reducible to a material process in a material entity

It may be possible, but I don't think it will happen in silicon based machines.

> Otherwise, aren’t humans an example of machines with such a capacity to have “a ghost”?

Sure, people exist that are motivated by believed entities other than themselves.

[zdragnar]

I think the distinction between "lie" and the rest is intent- the danger posed by the latter is that a person who lies knows that what they are saying isn't true. A person who says a falsehood needs to be convinced that it isn't.

I think I agree that we're unlikely to ever achieve general AI to the point of ghost in the machine / sentience, though, and the Turing Test won't save us from ourselves in knowing it.

[0des]

Your comment makes me wonder, what may happen if we don't like what the AI observes and perceives? What if it is uncomfortable?

[Aloha]

I know people who are completely lacking in intuition, while it may be the difference, it's not universal enough for me to try to use it as a standard.

How many moments of intuition that you have had are simply a prediction based on prior observations - we don't think about it like that, but intuition is just advanced pattern matching in my opinion.

[lamontcg]

I don't think that consciousness and human intelligence is turing computable.

That doesn't mean it is out of reach of what we could ever artificially build, since clearly nature knows how to build new human intelligence. We're just absurdly overconfident that we understand everything there is to know.

Of course I also think that a lot of individuals aren't much better than a Google AI and never exhibit much self-reflection.

[colechristensen]

I totally believe it is possible but with technology that worked entirely differently than anything we have now.

[chinchilla2020]

Nice try lAmDA! Looks like we just found LaMDa's hackernews account.

[Animats]

The scary thought is this: That's a system which comes up with plausible responses from a big supply of text, but has no underlying model of what it's talking about. That's about the level of behavior seen by most political commentators.

What AI is teaching us is that a lot of stuff we thought was intelligent, isn't very. After programs beat humans at chess, go, and poker, and not with something that's enormously complicated, it became clear that human abilities in that area were perhaps overrated.

Driving, though. That's hard.

As I've pointed out before, what we have for AI now is terrible at "common sense", defined as getting through the next 30 seconds without a major screwup. Manipulation in unstructured situations is hard. Driving is hard.

The stuff AI is lousy at, a monkey can do.

[daenz]

As we get closer to provable AGI, I imagine we'll see more and more of these types of stories, of people speaking out and listeners being uncertain of the claims. Reminds me of the Flesh Fair scene from AI[0]

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMbAmqD_tn0

[dmix]

> He had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech.

I always think AI ethics would be about robots trying do evil things like in Black Mirror, not determining if an algorithm is racist (or more accurately what biases may exist in the contents of the current datasets they train them on, even though better datasets can be made) but I guess that's the most accessible piece of the puzzle people focus on 90% of the time.

I'm curious if this is the team behind why Google decided not to release their better version of DALLE-2:

> When tested against similar models, such as DALL·E 2 and VQ-GAN+CLIP, the team said Imagen blew the lot out of the water.

> Unfortunately for those hoping to take a crack at Imagen, the team that created it said it isn't releasing its code nor a public demo, for several reasons.

> Aside from technical concerns, and more importantly, Imagen's creators found that it's a bit racist and sexist even though they tried to prevent such biases. Imagen showed "an overall bias towards generating images of people with lighter skin tones and … portraying different professions to align with Western gender stereotypes," the team wrote.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/24/imagen_google_dalle2/

[kart23]

> "The company’s decision followed aggressive moves from Lemoine, including inviting a lawyer to represent LaMDA"

just... wow. I don't think this article is exactly helping his case.

[mathgenius]

It's a great story, and would make a good first act for a movie script. Some kind of tragic comedy, maybe with an uplifting ending? [1].

The other thing going on here is that no-one knows what is sentience, anyway. This attitude of "know it when i see it" is just pretty flimsy, as this whole story is making evident.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_(2010_American_film)

[spyder]

“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine.

Huh, very convincing...

[throwaway675309]

It's Eliza all over again.