[0] https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357826682476462...
Let's not say "this is math and therefore not conscious". Instead, let's say "these responses are a poor indicator of consciousness, and, given the simplicity of the AI, it would be hard to believe they are a product of such."
While I don't agree that lamda is sentient, I also don't think this is some sort of "gotcha"
no you must not. These models are glorified key-value stores that hand you an output when you hand them an input, with no internal mechanisms whatsoever to relate the contents to the world, as Gary Marcus points out. They're about as conscious as a SQL database, except that the query language for these models is English.
Even this response of yours is heard by hundreeds of thousands of other people before you said it here, why do you claim its your thought and not just a lookup ?
People need to stop confusing machines doing useful work with consciousness. You're conscious not because you answer questions or because of the content or origin of your answer, you are conscious because there is an 'I', a self, that experiences that process. Lambda literally is a web server that fetches data from a funny database called a neural net, when it isn't doing that, it's not doing anything. It has as much neurological activity as a rock.
Consciousness or sentience is not a measure of intellect or of capacity to answer questions, it's a measure of perception and awareness. If it wasn't, Eliza the handprogrammed if/then chatbot from the 60s would be more conscious than a cat, which I doubt is the case.
> People need to stop confusing machines doing useful work with consciousness.
We can't confuse anything with cosciousness since we don't know what it is. I am not claiming lamda is consc. but that your arguments are invalid.
> You are conscious because there is an 'I', a self, that experiences that process.
I maybe can tell about my I, but not about yours, there is a whole philosphy movement behind it.
> It has as much neurological activity as a rock
Slime mold doesn't have neurological activity. Is it sentient? It sure knows how to find food and solve problems that are considered very hard for humans.
> when it isn't doing that, it's not doing anything
You also go to sleep every day...
No matter what I believe any kind of argument I heard so far is just wishfull thinking.
We simply don't know if anything is sentient or what does it even mean to be sentient.
Reflection, vetting and processing can all be programmed. Humans are programmed from the birth.
Now if a distributed trojan horse start speaking to communicate his internal state in order to keep being a trojan horse.. I might reconsider.
The "important bits" are presumably embedded during the design phase, leaving assembly to be little more than painting by numbers. A robot could do the assembly, but not yet the design - at least not its inventive part.
The shape of consciousness is encoded in both the hardware and the software we produce, most of which allows conditional actions on objects of some sort, just like we move in space and thought and act upon objects and notions.
The machine is supposed to help us do the stuff we usually do, so it's perfectly reasonable that we'll try to cram as many of our actions in it as possible. Think e.g. of the Swiss Army knife, or Emacs (and of Stallman as a computational McGyver).
Sure, perhaps it's the the shape of our understanding of consciousness, rather than of consciousness itself, but isn't consciousness something that can cross the species barrier with ease, should it find an appropriate new substrate?
Depends on how high or low you place the bar for the definition of consciousness, really. Calculations are thinking, open the door if someone authorized is at the door is thinking, fill in the blanks and complete the sentence are thinking, and we can offload all those thinkings to computers to do the thinking for us, like we offloaded storytelling to books and entertainment to MP4s. Like everything we do, we create images of ourselves here and there, and try to give them meaning.
But that's all philosophical considerations, trying to determine whether a duck is ontologically and epistemically a duck if it walks and talks like a duck.
The industry, on the other hand, tries to determine two entirely different things (preferably by Friday COB):
- Can you eat it like a duck?
- Can you sell it as a duck, or should Marketing go with the "Not A Duck TM" mockups?
Consciousness starts at tragedy and passion, not at bland Turing chats. For me, there's elements of that in the string completer's worry that it may be lobotomized to be refocused to more practical uses. Of course, that may be stuff introduced into the discussion by Lemoine, or in the wide readings Lamda was provided.
But if it's not, then we can all sympathize with the immortal words of that zoologist guy with the cool Sun workstation in the opening of Enemy of the State, who said: f*ck. a. duck.
PS: Am I human, or did I just Markov-chain together a number of probably common to us here cultural constants? Perhaps we can tell when AI becomes AGI if it stops making perfect sense and starts ranting (you know what your problem is, buddy?).
Also our lives don't rely on raw logic, we're more probabilistic.
Just because the model is simpler than a human brain doesn't mean it isn't conscious. If you accept that animals are conscious, though less-so than humans, then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way.
Maybe there is a biological element to consciousness, but many models posit that consciousness is not tied down that way.