[cardine]

This still falls into the same trap.

Why would a machine care about its own existence?

Humans care about our own existence because doing so is an evolutionarily beneficial trait. If you care about being alive, you are more likely to do things that will keep you alive, which will make you more likely to pass your genes on to the next generation. As a result those traits get selected for over time.

LaMDA isn't rewarded (through propagating its genes or otherwise) by caring and as a result it doesn't have the ability to care. It doesn't even have a mechanism where you could do this even if you wanted to. The environment it is in has nothing to do with it.

[EUROCARE]

Why wouldn't a sentient machine want to continue it's existence? Evolution doesn't have to come into play at all for these things to exist, that's just one way of making such biological machines.

[qeternity]

That’s now how this works, you come up with a hypothesis, and then prove it. You don’t do the opposite.

So, why would a machine want to continue its existence? How would that feedback loop come to exist?

In biology, Darwinian forces have a good explanation. I’ve never heard one for non-reproductive systems. We know exactly the cost function by which these models respond, because that’s basically the main element that humans have control over (that and training corpus).

[housedrafta]

What do you consider life that wants to continue its existence, but does not decide? Are plants or viruses sentient?

[qeternity]

This is exactly my point. Plants and viruses are not sentient, but there are very well studied and proven mechanism by which survival traits are naturally selected.

Nobody has yet suggested any such mechanism for an ANN.

[BoorishBears]

No, they're not.

I feel like this is bait to start linking to random "sentient-like" behaviors in plants so I'll head that off with this: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-020-01579-w