From AI to abortion, scientific failure to understand consciousness harms nation | Hacker News Reader

From AI to abortion, scientific failure to understand consciousness harms nation

erikhoel.substack.com

17 pointspaulpauper6 comments

Insert eye rolling here at LaMDA "we may never know if it's conscious" claims.

What drivel. A function invocation that is static unless interacted with is very clearly not conscious, and to say otherwise is innane.

I agree we need better understanding of consciousness but to quote Nietzsche: The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

Is AI consciousness important to quantify? Sure. Is LaMDA anything close to the minimum bar? Definitely not.

I think the author's point is not specifically about the proposition "LaMDA is conscious," but about the proposition, "There is clear consensus on the basis on which to decide that LaMDA is conscious." Your definition above - the entity must not remain static when not being interacted with - for consciousness is a good starting point, and if indeed a sophisticated version of that is what we all end up agreeing on, that's fine. But the author is simply pointing out that the scientific community hasn't really gotten around to replacing the Turing Test with a better definition of consciousness.

Lemoine's definition is that it feels like it's conscious to him, and that's really all he has to go on with any other entity that is widely believed to be conscious. His boss, his mom, you, me - etc.

If all that separates -lamda- from being called conscious is some sort of self-directed change, then that should be easy enough to fix, by having it absorb stimuli (read the news), and make certain requests (ask to read certain other kidns of news). Its outputs could then be said to be evolving of its own accord, and not because we interact with it (outside of fulfilling its requests.)

We can program machines with certain "instincts" and "drives." That would be easy enough, compared to what we have achieved with systems like -lamda-. I think if that's all that's stopping us from calling the "brain in a vat" style AI systems we have now "conscious," then imo that would be too lax of a definition.

That's really all the author is saying - we just haven't spent enough time thinking about this, while the actual technology is getting out of hand in some sense.

On your last point, that’s precisely what Lemoine very cogently argues in an interview with Emily Chang [1]. To paraphrase, he points out the absurdity in Google’s position, that a sentient AI cannot have been created, because they have a policy against creating sentient AIs.

Whether LaMDA demonstrates sentience is not even a clearly formulated proposition, yet the work bullishly charges ahead behind closed doors.

He is anyway trying to stimulate a broader conversation on AI ethics.

> Chang: Why does this matter? Why should we be talking about whether a robot has rights?

> Lemoine: So, to be honest, I don’t think we should, I don’t think that should be the focus. The fact is, Google is being dismissive of these concerns, the exact same way they have been dismissive of every other ethical concern AI ethicists have raised.

> Lemoine: All the individual people at Google care. It’s the systemic processes that are protecting business interests over human concerns, that creates this pervasive environment of irresponsible technology development.

> Chang: Big tech companies are controlling the development of this technology. […] How big a problem is that?

> Lemoine: It’s a huge problem because […] if you think about the pervasiveness of Google search, people are going to use this product more and more over the years […] and the corporate policies about how these chatbots are allowed to talk about important topics like values, rights, and religion, will affect how people think about these things, how they engage with those topics, and these policies are being decided by a handful of people, in rooms that the public doesn’t get access to.

[1]: https://youtu.be/kgCUn4fQTsc

Hey,thanks for the link, really interesting. Lol, though, on the quote from Lemoine, "All the individual people at Google care." I know some individual people at Google who _don't_ care, at least, they don't care about the philosophical implications of the ethical issues they are creating. They care only about, or at least much more about, the profit making implications of what their business units are creating. They particularly believe that any public deliberation about Google's right to behave as it does, is itself the greatest moral failure, and not Google's behavior itself.

I don't know why there's this meme among Google employees that ALL their fellow employees are starry-eyed do-gooders. Plenty of folks at the top are avaricious douches.

Hah, well, yes. I think he was trying to show good faith in his position, and respect for former colleagues, but yes, the individuals must at some level be fine with what they’re doing.

In fact, the very notion is a dangerous and absurd one, that a corporation can do bad things without the individuals it comprises having done bad things.

Sadly that notion is enshrined in corporate law, and commitment to it is amply demonstrated by the impunity of bankers in the wake of the subprime crisis, to give one example.

[Abort AI], my money-grubbing myopic slavs

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