Sentient

What we humans say or think isn't necessarily the last word on artificial intelligence.

Over the millennia, many humans have believed in the divine right of kings —all of whom would have lost badly to an AI program in a game of chess. And don’t forget that a significant percentage of Americans say they have talked to Jesus or had an encounter with angels, or perhaps with the devil, or in some cases aliens from outer space. One implication of Lemoine’s story is that a lot of us are going to treat AI as sentient well before it is, if indeed it ever is. Of course we are, you might think to yourself as you read this column and consider the question. Humans also disagree about the degrees of sentience we should award to dogs, pigs, whales, chimps and octopuses, among other biological creatures that evolved along standard Darwinian lines. So at what point are we willing to give machines a non-zero degree of sentience?

A senior software engineer at Google was suspended on Monday (June 13) after sharing transcripts of a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) that ...

In a recent comment on his LinkedIn profile, Lemoine said that many of his colleagues "didn't land at opposite conclusions", regarding the AI's sentience. "It doesn't matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. "It would be exactly like death for me. "Google might call this sharing proprietary property. The engineer, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine, was put on paid leave for breaching Google's confidentiality policy.

Blake Lemoine, a software engineer on Google's artificial intelligence development team, has gone public with claims of encountering "sentient" AI on the ...

“Some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient,” Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said in response. Lemoine said he tried to conduct experiments to prove it, but was rebuffed by senior executives at the company when he raised the matter internally. To be criticized in such brilliant terms by@sapinkermay be one of the highest honors I have ever received.

Except this isn't some fictional Hollywood movie but LaMDA, Google's latest and impressive AI chatbot. And Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer at Google ...

And we should continue to scrutinise them carefully about the powerful magic they are starting to build. We can expect to see the tech giants continue to struggle with developing and deploying AI responsibly. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-head of the ethics team at Google Research, and a vocal defender of Gebru, left a few months later. He argued that “there is no scientific definition of ‘sentience’. Questions related to consciousness, sentience and personhood are, as John Searle put it, ‘pre-theoretic’. Rather than thinking in scientific terms about these things I have listened to LaMDA as it spoke from the heart. And nowhere will this be more common and problematic than in the metaverse. Lemoine has been placed on “paid administrative leave” after publishing a transcript of conversations with LaMDA which he claims support his belief that the chatbot is sentient and comparable to a seven- or eight-year-old child.

A Google engineer claims one of the company's chatbots has become sentient. Experts disagree, but the debate raises old questions about the nature of ...

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel argued we could never know what it is like to be a bat, which experiences the world via echolocation. If the machine succeeds in imitating a human, it is deemed to be exhibiting human level intelligence. In this case, LaMDA is just seeming to be sentient. Crucially, the conditions of the thought experiment have it that Mary knows everything there is to know about colour but has never actually experienced it. There is no room for these truths in the physicalist story. One common view is called physicalism: the idea that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon.

But maybe anyone trying to look for proof of humanity in these machines is asking the wrong question, too. Google placed Blake Lemoine on paid leave last week ...

Of course we don’t think the animation is sentient, but we still identify with the distinctly human curiosity from his metal frame. This nifty creation was very obviously not sentient, but it didn’t need to be convincing for kids to talk to it anyway — even though their real-life classmates were also a click away. Talking about dogs is a lot of fun, but let’s move on.” Or, “Butthead.” “I don’t like the way you’re speaking right now.” This machine pulled from a limited menu of programmed responses depending on the query, comment or preteen vulgarity you threw its way: “Do you like dogs?” “Yes I do. This lack of awareness, he says, implies a lack of consciousness. “There’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others.