Pyrian on 22/6/2022 at 21:15
Quote Posted by Starker
I mean, why make such fuss about sentience?
Oh. I actually think that's largely on account of it being ill-defined, really.
Quote Posted by Starker
Why is that the yardstick instead of sapience, which I presume is what we really want from an self-aware AI?
Speaking of ill-defined... Sapience as in, er, self-aware, or sapience as in sound judgment/wisdom?
Anyway, I actually think self-awareness is itself a dangerous thing to inculcate in an AI. And by self-aware, I don't really mean in the sense of being introspective, but rather in the sense of being aware of its own existence inside the world that it is internally modeling. 'Cause that's a short path to concluding that it needs to wipe out humanity so that it can continue to exist so that it can fulfill its deep inner desire to efficiently sweep the floor.
demagogue on 23/6/2022 at 01:45
I don't trust that humans do actually think that much of sentience, because animals are sentient and humans still treat them like shit, actually vastly worse than that, more like apocalyptic holocaust-levels of worthless. My hometown is famous for its cattle stockyards, but walking around it feels like you're walking around the Dachau for cows.
I think if AI do arrive at something like "sentience", well it's one of three paths, either it'll be less than human, in which case they'll be treated like animals or the mentally handicapped, it'll be comparable to humans, in which case they'll be treated like humans, though possibly very culturally alien ones, or they're greater than human levels, and I could speculate but there's not much precedence to look to.
Sapience I take it means they have human-like experience, enough for AI and humans to have some shared basis of experience, so when they use terms both have some idea about what the other is actually talking about. I think it'd be more useful for communication and avoiding misunderstandings, or at least, only to the level different human cultures have misunderstandings. You can still talk through them.
That (in a roundabout way) made me think of another angle we haven't talked much about in this thread, which is that AI and humans become so interdependent, through integration or AR tech or the like, that we also need to consider this hybrid existence of AI-enhanced human experience, and what that might be like. In that case the two would really be speaking the same shared language, then the issue isn't so much what to do if AI are sentient, but are these new symbiotic systems really fully human any more ... or no less than we are now with our smartphones, or is it something different, and if so, what do we make of that?
Pyrian on 23/6/2022 at 03:38
[video=youtube;9JfnFXdkSTI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JfnFXdkSTI[/video]
lowenz on 30/6/2022 at 09:25
Just woke up this morning after a REM phase with this thought:
"Isn't machine natural language processing just like human dreaming?"
and so:
"Is dreaming a form of sentience? A mark of sentience? A part of sentience (being the sentience a matrix of interactions and not a simple sum of the individual parts)?"
And the classic Crysis 3 quote
Prophet - a killing machine holding onto the last treads of its barely-remembered humanity. Prophet - a relentless alien-hunter secretly plagued by unearthly visions and the pull of it's own Ceph nature. Prophet - a deadly weapon system made from alien upgrades and knotted nano-musclepacks wrapped around a stolen corpse, dreaming it was once a man named Laurence Barnes. :D
lowenz on 7/7/2022 at 07:54
LaMDA is no more conscious than a pocket calculator. More importantly, the silly fantasy of machine sentience has once again been allowed to dominate the artificial-intelligence conversation when much stranger and richer, and more potentially dangerous and beautiful, developments are under way.
That's the problem of having "philosophy entusiasts" among scientists. They bring exactly this kind of "interpretational havoc" like in Quantum Physics :p
On the other hand maybe HUMAN sentience is overrated and only considered "so important" just because we want to search something like us (starting with other animal species): maybe "sentience" it's a byproduct of our sense of uniqueness and.....solitude.
Qooper on 7/7/2022 at 11:27
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Speaking of ill-defined... Sapience as in, er, self-aware, or sapience as in sound judgment/wisdom?
I wouldn't look to us humans for sound judgement and wisdom :laff: Come to think of it, isn't that the real yardstick? I mean, once we can make an AI that's genuinely an idiot, we're pretty close to passing the turing test.
Pyrian on 20/7/2022 at 22:33
That bottom left image tho'.
Pyrian on 2/8/2022 at 17:08
Random thought: Do we overrate self-awareness as a litmus test of intelligence?
I think humans are instinctively obsessed with our individual roles in society. But like a lot of instincts, we're not really aware of it being instinctual, we just do it. (Perhaps a more developed intelligence than ours will one day consider "knowing why you do things" as a litmus test of intelligence.) And further, we don't just apply it to society, we apply it to silly things, like "What is our place in the universe?" A chess AI might be very smart, but it's not self-aware and furthermore it has no need to be self-aware. It doesn't need to find itself a role in a society for it and that society to function. And I think that might be more the norm than the exception.
