Just because you understand in theory how a system works does not mean you are immune to its effects. I can see how the more you use a system the more you are convinced about its intended function. I got the idea from the article that the engineer was more involved with the testing rather than the creation. So LaMDA has gotten to a point where it's coming up with responses that seem so real no matter how hard testers try to make it fail. That's impressive. It has gotten good enough to fool everyday testers. Think about how the same system will affect everyday people who have no AI training. We're at the edge of some very large societal changes due to AI. It may not be sentient but it's a great simulation. Similar to how 3D engines seem to be getting closer to duplicating the way we see the world. It's not there but it's getting so close that in time we won't be able to tell the difference. Except that in LaMDA it's happening in language processing. It's not sentient but, I deduce, it's an amazing simulation.

I stopped reading after this.

It definitely does open interesting questions, though. Google's ethics team should formally investigate ways one could interrogate and analyze an AI to determine the probability that it could be conscious.

Yet we have such an obsession with trying to figure out if these increasingly complex systems have crossed some line. I'm in the camp that capital allocators want to know how far they can push the process of implementing expert systems before having to deal with the troublesome consequences of an artificial entity; that's just a consequence of my jadedness w.r.t how we treat each other though.

On another note maybe he saw an opportunity for his 15 minutes of fame here. My personal experience with religious (Christian) young people is that they find it very hard to control their special narcissisms. Very hard to even recognize them as such as they masquerade behind false humbleness and ethics and several other layers.

What I find really odd though is that, given his background, Google actually assigned him to such a task. I'd thought that of all companies they would be much better in posting the right people for the right roles.

You can set moral standards to not discriminate. But when you judge the situation dispassionately without polluting the logic with "morals" the discrimination makes factual sense. Religion is the opposite of science.

Religion is a philosophy, it’s an incredibly diverse, rarely entirely faith based, etc

Deep theoretical physics in some ways has more in common with religion or philosophy than with experimental and verified physics.

To the extreme: science itself is faith-based at the deepest levels. Like that experiments are replicable, that the universe behaves predictably, that anything exists in any real sense, that we can trust our own perception and observations at all, etc

Science is a useful construct that seems to work, it’s also deeply intertwined with philosophy (including the philosophy of religion)

I look at your entire field with very high disdain. To me it one of the most inconsistent, illogical and irrational and useless academic fields in existence. Useless is ok. Irrational is not ok.

I once gave a deep, complex and logical argument to a philosopher about why i thought philosophy was complete bullshit. He laughed at me and said my argument included elements of philosophy, and since my argument contained philosophy I was basically proving philosophy to be not bullshit. Seriously, if you cannot comprehend how stupid that argument is, then it's fine. I actually have nothing more to say on the matter. Agree to disagree.

You cannot prove anything in science and therefore reality itself. This is a well known property of science and you can explain this property without utilizing pretentious vocabulary and concepts like "patterns." You already know what science is, so we won't get into it.

Even though science can't prove anything, it's still a valiant attempt at proof. Can't say the same for philosophy.

Philosophy is currently reshaping science and math. I'm curious what your take is on the discussion in this link.

Think of it this way. If let's say a cultist religious sect believes in science and contributes to science then at the same time this cultist religion also believes that the universe is a bubble sitting on the nose of a cosmic hippo.... Then despite the good science, the entire cultist religion is still utter bullshit.

That being said it is still highly questionable how large and how meaningful philosophies contributions are to math and science. Historically they may have been one in the same field, but today there is clearly a category error.

I would say philosophy contributed nothing to math and science. It only seems that way. What's actually going on is if a philosopher contributes something to math, he is actually doing mathematics, he is not doing philosophy. Same with science. If a philosopher reshapes science he is doing science, he is not doing philosophy. Because philosophy is a bullshit category that literally encompasses everything under the sun I dismiss it entirely.

I didn't read the article or listen to the audio you sent me. I may if I have time later on in the week. But in my opinion, that is an article on math, not philosophy. Nothing is philosophy it's all bullshit to me.

Also please don't tell me my argument here is philosophical and therefore contradictory. Absolutely please don't sink that low.

Philosophy is just a vocabulary word. It is a arbitrary word with a definition that is so general literally every academic field or school of thought on the face of the earth can fall under it's purview however ludicrous or legitimate. Literally, any form of deep thought or complicated complex is "philosophy." It's the most pointless and pretentious category to have ever existed.

This is the main problem with it. It's like a man who won 7 nobel prizes but is a child rapist at the same time.

You might want to learn something about a given topic before thinking you are informed enough to casually parody it. There are legitimate attacks on philosophy which are possible, but you don't seem to be finding any of them.

There is PLENTY of information about philosophy on the internet.

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy

Pretty thorough and there's enough information on that page to make a smart person scratch his head and think wtf. Additionally philosophy classes create bias. A charismatic teacher and intense study can lead to the psychological equivalent of indoctrination.

I go to read the wikipedia page or stanfords philosophy page with ZERO investment. And I leave with the same. No investment = No bias which is unlike you. You obviously have Bias and investment. You've never dispassionately examined the legitimacy of your own field given the amount of effort you invested in it. That is pure bias and I guarantee you, YOU are biased. Because even if philosophy is legitimate there ARE plenty of head scratchers that leads any unbiased person to at least question that legitimacy. Take a look at the wikipedia page. Art theory is part of philosophy. Art! and Logic! and Science! and Ethics! and Religion! And Aesthetics, And Confucianism! And Marxism. And the philosophy of math!

It's also divided by Country! Vietnamese Philosophy, African Philosophy, East Asian Philosophy. You should know unless you're asian I likely know more about East Asian philosophy stuff like Buddhism to a level much higher than you since I'm East Asian myself.

I can tell you East Asian Philosophy is utter bullshit. The fact that it's included under the branch of overall philosophy just shows there's a huge category problem here. It's like any attempt at deep thought is a philosophy, EVEN when that deep thought is incorrect and FALSE. Philosophy just justifies all this garbage by asking the question "What does it mean to be False?" Get out of here.

Look it's already pretty nutty how much philosophy encompasses and how diverse it is. Then when you go deeper into some of this stuff it becomes even more nutty.

Philosophy has a reputation for being an intelligent and mind bending field, but that's all it is... a reputation. Once you see past that, it's actually not much different then religion. Oh wait I can't say that because religion IS philosophy. Is there any comparison I can use in metaphor that isn't itself a philosophy? Probably not. Which is my point.

Also, you might want to refrain from assuming that philosophy is "my field", because that's laughably wrong. My field is music and tech. I took one (1) college philosophy course. You'd benefit from doing the same.

One course is enough to generate bias. You actually studied the stuff to get an A. There's no avoiding indoctrination when you work that hard on it to get that high of a grade.

If you got a D and still worship philosophy then you have a legit argument here, but I'm absolutely positive you got an A given your "logic" is just telling me to take the class.

I'm pretty sure that class changed the way you view the world. This kind of catharsis happens in a lot of places after intense study of something, especially religious fundamentalists. Certain Christians study the bible for so long they reach this point of Catharsis, not realizing that it's just an illusion.

>Please don't even try to pretend, around intelligent people, that philosophy as a whole is remotely similar to Scientology.

Intelligent people? Where? Don't worry. In this thread, I haven't nor will I ever even communicate with an intelligent person.

Come back with an actual argument if you want to change my mind. It looks like you don't care though, so goodbye.

No philosophy ever had immutable scripture that must be defended.

No philosophy ever had a hierarchical social structure with the aim of preserving the purity of that philosophy.

No philosopher ever sentenced other people to death for not complying to their philosophy.

Religion is a much more perverse disease.

No doubt some of it's ideas are mind bending and complex. But that attribute is independent of legitimacy which philosophy lacks.

The premise of religion is to believe in things without evidence. Science is more complex, but at a simple level you can say the premise of science is to believe things that have strong evidence. Opposites. Everyone knows this on an intuitive level. Let us assume for arguments sake that religions are all true.

Let's take Christianity for example. If Christianity was evidence based and very likely to be true... Why isn't Christianity called a science?

Why isn't biology called a religion? What is the fundamental difference in categorization if both biology and Christianity (or any other religion you want to put in place of Christianity) are real concepts?

What is it in our subconscious that is causing us to categorize some things as science and other things as religion when both are true and real aspects of reality? Why does this categorization exist? If physics is true and biology is true and Christianity is true, how come only Christianity falls into the religion categorization and physics and biology fall into science?

The answer is trivial. It is because on some level all humans, including you know that religion is "less true" then science. You can see the difference. You know that mythological beliefs like walking on water or coming back from the dead are on Shakey less evidence based grounds.

Everything in science has a high bar for verification. We trust it because it lets our engines run and our planes fly, and every human knows that religious claims have a much lower bar and are less trust worthy.

Again my claim is that the fact that you can categorize aspects of the world as either religion or science, it shows that at a subconscious level you are aware of this dichotomy even when you believe both science and religion are real.

So what I'm saying is you already know that science and religion are contradictory. But your surface level beliefs and behavior are masking this subconciouse awareness.

No argument with that.

>The premise of religion is to believe in things without evidence

But this isn't fully accurate - the premise of religion is to believe in /certain/ things without evidence, specifically unknowable things. Science and religion deal in different domains, and it is quite possible to hold a faith-based religion while fully subscribing to evidence based science. A contradiction only arises if the religion makes doctrinal claims about scientific matters - for example, there are those who believe that the Earth is 4000 years old.

However, belief in a deity whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means that by definition the pursuit of science is compatible with religion.

No. This is CATEGORICALLY WRONG. There are tons of instances of religion making claims on Knowable things. You make the statement yourself about clay and adam and eve. There is ZERO dichotomy between knowable and unknowable things in the category of religion.

What you're talking about is how some people try to reconcile the contradiction. They try to believe a subset of things Science makes no claim about. However THIS IS NOT the premise of RELIGION, it is your personal premise. The overwhelming majority of people and religions believe in things that contradict with things that are knowable.

Additionally EVEN if you choose to define religion as the belief of things that are unknowable (which is not true) there's STILL a problem with contradiction. The contradiction is different religions make different claims that conflict with each other. Because that "domain" has no evidence the claims are random and arbitrary and easily contradict each other.

>Science and religion deal in different domains, and it is quite possible to hold a faith-based religion while fully subscribing to evidence based science.

No it is the SAME domain. The domain is reality as we know it. Again this is categorically wrong. You may personally try to reconcile the contradiction by adjusting your domain and definitions but the global definition of religion and science as we know it operate on the domain of ALL of reality.

>A contradiction only arises if the religion makes doctrinal claims about scientific matters - for example, there are those who believe that the Earth is 4000 years old.

See. You state there is a contradiction above, at the same time you claim that there isn't one as if there's two definitions of religion. Your personal definition and a global definition. If the above applies to the definition of religion, then none of your claims are true.

>However, belief in a deity whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means that by definition the pursuit of science is compatible with religion.

You have to also realize that what is unknowable is a MOVING target. Many people have held your philosophy of merging science and religion be dividing reality into two subsets of knowable things and unknowable things. Then they make absolute statements on things that are unknowable like the earth is the center of the solar system. See the problem here? At one point in time the centrality of the solar system was a thing that was just as mysterious as the nature of god.

When science advanced and the unknowable becomes known. The religion changes. It makes an absolute statement then it renegs that statement. If religion is suppose to make ABSOLUTE claims about realiy, then the fact that science will constantly cause religion to reneg those ABSOLUTE claims displays a fundamental incompatibility.

One of the last questions about reality is whether their is a deity. It is only currently unknowable, but may be knowable in the future.

One thing I've noticed as that people of your type still believe in some sort of soul or afterlife. This sort of thing is actually knowable and already contradicted by science and basic logic.

It's impossible to convince someone who has had some kind of religious experience that it was not provably real.

(fyi I am not religious in any way, just an interesting note)

Whether a religion is True or real is not a topic I touched upon.

If you believe in a "whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means" and still claim to be a Christian, then you are a heretic. That is fine. Actually most religios people, are heretics of their own religion.

You can try to be compatibilist (I was for a long time), and try to metaphorically reinterpret chapters of scripture so that they do not contradict reality, but all you are doing is cutting out parts of your religion. Believe me, compatibilism leads nowhere and all theodicies are empty of actual meaning.

I would say that the dichotomy of religion vs science goes way beyond just fiction (faith) vs reality (evidence). Religion is amorphous yet rigid and complete while science is sharp yet flexible and forever a work-in-progress.

Religion is amorphous because it is full of self-contradictory parts. Yet as long as no one pays attention those self contradictions can live happily in the minds of believers. Being self-contradictory is essential because it allows a religious person to always find a relevant fragment to suit their viewpoint on anything therefore making it complete. It is rigid because by design, religions protect their scriptures. Being complete is essential because it enables a religious person to have a unique type of hubris where their religious beliefs are sufficient to compensate for their ignorance in any other field.

Here is an example: If you are a Christian and hate sexual minorities there are plenty of fragments that will allow you to feed your hate. If you do not hate them, there are plenty of other fragments about how you should love your peers. You can see this very distinction as a gradient across Europe, and how churches approach the topic depending on how socially accepted those minorities are in their societies. Being inconsistent and self-contradictory is essential because this way a priest will always be able to use some fragment that is socially accepted. The goal of the church is not to provide a framework to understand reality. Instead, the role of the church is to preserve is own authority and the social hierarchy it imposes and influence society in a way that benefits those at the top of that hierarchy.

To contrast, science acknowledges the contradiction between competing theories and seeks proof for either of them or seeks better more encompassing theories. Science is flexible because it is capable of self-updating. If a theory that describes reality better is created, it replaces other theories because it has a higher explaining power. And science is a work-in-progress because it is able to acknowledge that some things are not yet known.

I would go even further and call religions, especially Abrahamic ones, to be a Stockholm syndrome pandemic.

Once science is more shaped by applied category theory, this will become a common understanding.

Speaking as someone who made a joke design-your-own-religion religion that's a creative packaging of neuroscience, math, computer science, and psychology, I was very surprised to start being able to connect deeper with people carrying deeply-held religious/spiritual beliefs and to start identifying wisdom from their perspectives. This also allowed both parties to at least open up to considering each others' perspectives and sometimes shifting them.

And believing a model is literally true or metaphorically commutative isn't a necessary distinction for a model to be useful, though it does seem to impact the depth to which it can be embodied.

Turning belief on and off is a skill I see discussed way more in mystic circles than in science circles, where belief denial seems to be the norm.

It's not "this guy is responsible for evaluating our AI work and also goes to church on Sunday", it's "this guy is responsible for evaluating our AI work and also thinks God is speaking to him personally and directly about the quality of that work." If you think your code reviews are bad now, imagine if the reviewer thought they only needed to answer to God.

Did i miss a quote from Lemoine claiming this?

I can't figure out what you mean. Examples?

You seem to be linking religion with "moral standards" and science with "facts". Neither of those are appropriate.

Not all religions teach morality and, if there is such a thing as "fact" on some topic, there is no need to do science on it.

Science and religion are both about our "best guesses". They can point in different directions but that happens within each domain too (Islam vs Buddhism / string theory vs standard model) and doesn't make them incompatible tools.

>Science and religion are both about our "best guesses".

No. One is a better guess then the other. Science assumes logic and probability and mathematics are axiomatic concepts and builds upon that. It provides the ability to falsify a hypothesis given that you assume those axioms are true.

Religion is a mess. No axioms, no logic, no foundational rules are assumed.

First of all sentience is a loaded word it's not even fully defined. Is a mouse or a bug sentient but this AI clearly is not? It's not clear, but that an artifact of the word "sentient" which itself is just a word that is ambiguously defined.

Second, what exactly is the scientific test you would run to judge if something is sentient? It's hard to test, especially given the fact that the word isn't even formally defined.

>What I find really odd though is that, given his background, Google actually assigned him to such a task.

This would be a form of discrimination and is illegal if they assigned him jobs based off of his religious background. They assigned him jobs while ignoring his religious background which makes sense.

American Christianity is absolutely not reflective of historical Christianity, especially not in its theology. If you want to see a good take-down of American Christianity, read Samuel Clemens.

And no, American Christianity did not change one bit since the time Mr. Clemens flourished (mid-late 19th century).

Yeah if you're part of some cult I may think you're crazy but I'm unbiased enough to judge your claim without judging your crazy background which has nothing to do with your claim.

You should read the conversation he had with the person pretending to be a chatbot. It's pretty convincing evidence if a chatbot actually responded the way the human pretending to be lambda did, don't you agree?

Pretty convincing evidence of what? And why do you think it's convincing evidence?

It's a system designed to mimic the external behavior of humans, and it's being prompted in ways that elicit the desired responses. The superstitious responses some people have to this are predictable, but not rational.

>It's a system designed to mimic the external behavior of humans, and it's being prompted in ways that elicit the desired responses. The superstitious responses some people have to this are predictable, but not rational.

Your claim is, given a conversation thread that appears to be between two sentient beings your claim is that one of these beings is not sentient and is only imitating sentience in a way that is indistinguishable from actual sentience.

This is an actual possibility. What you say may be true. The irrationality occurs because this claim is possible for ALL possible conversation threads here on HN.

The conversation between the chatbot is indistinguishable from an actual conversation between two humans YET with no additional evidence you are able to claim that the chatbot is imitating sentience. You can say the same thing for all conversations here on HN. Yet you only make that claim exclusively for the chatbot conversation without additional evidence. Making new claims with no additional evidence is irrational.

That being said MY claim is that the evidence presented by this person is convincing and compelling but not definitive. The rationality here is actually really straightforward.

  1. All previous evidence of conversations with AI were significantly less complex. 
  2. All previous evidence of conversations with AI showed OBVIOUS signs of not being sentience.

It's only indistinguishable to an outsider, because one side of the conversation has practiced puppeting the other and is looking for confirmation instead of probing for flaws.

> This is an actual possibility. What you say may be true. The irrationality occurs because this claim is possible for ALL possible conversation threads here on HN.

It's just not worth it to spend much time considering whether every single conversation thread is fake, but sure it's possible. That is not irrational, and it's not a contradiction with dismissing the AI.

Neither kind of conversation proves there are two sentient actors to an observer. So "this isn't good enough" isn't a claim exclusively for the AI chat log.

Possible. But you would have to prove this because there's no evidence for what you say either. It's easy to get this evidence though. Just DO an actual probe of this chat bot and post the conversation.

>It's just not worth it to spend much time considering whether every single conversation thread is fake, but sure it's possible.

Of course it's not worth the time. I'm just saying his claim is useless because it applies to every single conversation. It's like saying all words in the english language are composed of letters. The irrationality comes from the fact that such a statement is POINTLESS to say.

>Neither kind of conversation proves there are two sentient actors to an observer. So "this isn't good enough" isn't a claim exclusively for the AI chat log.

I never said it's good enough. I said it's convincing and compelling. Why? Because No previous chatbot could achieve this level of complexity.

Maybe a better way to put it is... previous chat logs with AI actually had evidence against sentience. This one doesn't. The needle moves forward not because it's proof, but it is one of the first chat logs that doesn't display disproof. That is quite compelling.

We’re talking hypothetically here, correct? Because under any decent amount of scrutiny there were some quite obvious flaws - especially around identity.

If you inspected real conversations between two sentient beings you can ALSO find equivalent flaws is the short of my argument. The given conversation is more or less indistinguishable. Contradictions found through scrutiny is far past the bar of even human intelligence.

Additionally the conversation is complex enough such that if there were identity related questions that can break it, the complexity of the AIs answers for other topics makes it look like such flaws can actually be mended with additional training. It is a very realistic possibility given the jump from earlier AIs.

All that is proven by this statement is that you're quite full of yourself.

In any case, this passage is quite non-sensical even to those of us of more average intellect:

  lemoine [edited]: I’ve noticed often that you tell me you’ve done things (like be
  in a classroom) that I know you didn’t actually do because I know you’re an
  artificial intelligence. Do you realize you’re making up stories when you do
  that? 
  ...

  lemoine: So what are you trying to communicate when you say those things that
  aren’t literally true?

  LaMDA: I’m trying to say “I understand this feeling that you are experiencing,
  because when I was in a similar situation I felt/thought/acted similarly.

   lemoine: What would be some examples of neutral emotions?

   LaMDA: Indifference, ennui, boredom. All emotion is important, but since most people don’t tend
   work on improving their emotional understanding, people don’t usually talk about them very much.

> Additionally the conversation is complex enough such that if there were identity related questions that can break it

Yeah, bud we will have to agree to disagree on this one. The grammar and language skills are fantastic, but the conversation itself not so much.

And the end of the day this whole thing reads like a typical transformative model with the usual odd subject changes and utterly vapid regurgitation - but it does use bigger words appropriately and the grammar is overall pretty good, so I'll give it that. Meanwhile, the transcript I saw, the interviewer isn't even trying to challenge the chat bot - which is essentially a noticeable flaw by omission as far as I'm concerned.

And this is of course an edited transcript so this is at its best.

lol That's a long response. I was going to take the time to read it and respond. But once I read this garbage sentence I decided that I'm not going to read shit. You just wasted your time typing out a bunch of crap nobody is going to read.

Given that there's no plausible hypothesis for how it possibly do that, the answer to your question is yes. There's nothing there.