Looks like OpenAI has a Wikipedia Watch propaganda department.

Yep, familiar with all of those.


I'm imagining a scenario parallel to the transgender pronoun issue, where someone I know buys a fancy robot and expects me to treat it like a person.

I would be happy to, out of respect for this person's feelings. But plenty of people would refuse. It's a fascinating peek into a possible future.

Can't see why, but since you asked, I'm in my late 50s. — Isaac

Just an anthropological datum. Thanks for being open.

k
Computing, not thinking. Let's be clear on this.
— L'éléphant

What is the difference?
— Jackson — 180 Proof

I see this as the heart of the issue. Do you see a difference?

If what seems obvious to you can't simply and clearly be explicated to someone who doesn't see it, I'd say that's a good sign your belief is not as well grounded as you may have suspected. — Isaac

Fair enough. That's why I'm genuinely interested in understanding why you have an ethical concern about machines. Do you take offense at my using the word machine to describe what I assume you think may be sentient?


I assume it's only the possibility of sentience that could give rise to your ethical concerns. Do you agree?

Have you read anything of the early writing about 'the savages'. It's exactly the same linguistic style "they're obviously different", " they don't even have proper language "... You see the same tropes. — Isaac

I see a clear distinction between humans of all types and machinery of all types. I don't think the human brain is a kind of machine. Do you?

Do you believe in subjective experience? Plenty of folks hereabouts take issue with the concept and phraseology. What is your view of the hard problem of consciousness?


Genuinely trying to understand your concern for machinery.


I don't see any way into an ethical conception of circuitry apart from some parallel between the human brain and a machine. I take issue with the deployment of any such parallel.

In the flesh: Robot Rights:

Robot rights
"Robot rights" is the concept that people should have moral obligations towards their machines, akin to human rights or animal rights.[57] It has been suggested that robot rights (such as a right to exist and perform its own mission) could be linked to robot duty to serve humanity, analogous to linking human rights with human duties before society.[58] These could include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law.[59] The issue has been considered by the Institute for the Future[60] and by the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry.[61]

Experts disagree on how soon specific and detailed laws on the subject will be necessary.[61] Glenn McGee reported that sufficiently humanoid robots might appear by 2020,[62] while Ray Kurzweil sets the date at 2029.[63] Another group of scientists meeting in 2007 supposed that at least 50 years had to pass before any sufficiently advanced system would exist.[64] — wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence#Robot_rights


Curious to know if this is a reverberation of so-called Cultural Marxism and PC Culture.



Futhermore:

The philosophy of Sentientism grants degrees of moral consideration to all sentient beings, primarily humans and most non-human animals. If artificial or alien intelligence show evidence of being sentient, this philosophy holds that they should be shown compassion and granted rights. — wiki

I don't have to guess: it won't be circumspect analytical philosopher-types who make these declarations of sentience.



Fascinating planet: Earth.





Contra the above:

Joanna Bryson has argued that creating AI that requires rights is both avoidable, and would in itself be unethical, both as a burden to the AI agents and to human society. — wiki

Cool, I was just curious about it. I've been thinking about the I don't doubt up and coming AI rights movement.

That's a Twilight Zone episode I would watch.

Reposting this blurb on deception:

In the case of being deceived by a human-looking robot - well, then you add the element of deception. Deception can cause us to treat an enemy as a friend (etc) and could well cause us to experience a robot as a person and treat it accordingly. Nothing new there. Once the deception is revealed, we have eliminated the element of deception and return to treating the enemy as an enemy, the robot as a robot. — ZzzoneiroCosm

So if I'm lying in the street screaming in pain, you perform an autopsy first to check I've got the right 'guts' before showing any compassion? Good to know. — Isaac

Here to my lights you express a sense of having secured the moral high ground. This suggests an emotional investment in your defense of AI.

I'm curious to know if the notion of AI rights resonates with you. If you're willing to provide your age, that would be welcome too. Very curious about the cultural momentum surrounding this issue.

Re "technological correctness," I found this article from 1996 - and not much else:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1576269

It may be nothing.

Turning to Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme: In Part 1, Marx describes his vision of Stage 1 and Stage 2 of emergent communist society:

Stage 1:

The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values....The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor....But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby. — Marx - Critique of the Gotha Programme

Stage 2:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! — Ibid

"In our book Rebooting AI, Ernie Davis and I called this human tendency to be suckered by The Gullibility Gap — a pernicious, modern version of pareidolia, the anthromorphic bias that allows humans to see Mother Theresa in an image of a cinnamon bun.

Nice. :cool:

What is 'the same' exists wholly and solely on the level of symbolic abstraction, not blood, guts and nerves. — Wayfarer

Right. What's different wholly vitiates the similarity.


In the case of being deceived by a human-looking robot - well, then you add the element of deception. Deception can cause us to treat an enemy as a friend (etc) and could well cause us to experience a robot as a person and treat it accordingly. Nothing new there. Once the deception is revealed we have eliminated the element of deception and return to treating the enemy as an enemy, the robot as a robot.

Talking about me behind my back. Lying to get out of doing work. Getting irritable when tired. Going easy on me because my goldfish died. Forgetting my birthday then making it up to me a couple of days later. Long way to go. There's so much more than intelligence going on between us. When we can question the robot's sincerity, that's getting close. — Cuthbert

Not yet. But all logically possible to imitate.

But the moment they do, an argument from ineffable difference is going to be on very shaky ground. — Isaac

I think the difference will always be to some extent effable.

A human-looking robot may deceive us. But the guts of the robot are there to give the game away.

My main concern here is the invocation, as Wayfarer does of some ineffable 'essence' which makes us different from them despite seeming, to all intents and purposes, to be the same. — Isaac

Nothing ineffable to see here. The distinction is eminently effable.

One is the output of a computer program and one is the output of a human being.

nothing to distinguish the output of a person from the output of AI — ZzzoneiroCosm

To anticipate:

What distinguishes the linguistic output of a human being from the linguistic output of AI is an experience: namely, an awareness that human linguistic output has its origin in a human mind - or, dare I say, a subjectivity.

This awareness permeates our experience of all human linguistic output.

They appearing to all intents and purposes to be just like us but not 'really' like us. — Isaac

LaMDA doesn't appear to be "just like us." It appears to be a computer program.

Its output resembles human language and human affect and response. But LaMDA appears to be a computer program. In fact, it most certainly is a computer program.

There's something distinctly unsettling about the discussion of how the AI isn't 'really' sentient though...not like us.

They appearing to all intents and purposes to be just like us but not 'really' like us. Am I the only one discomfited by that kind of thinking? — Isaac

This possibly points to the significance of your undisclosed view of the hard problem of consciousness.

For folks who say there is no hard problem of consciousness, or say there is no such thing as consciousness - nothing to distinguish the output of a person from the output of AI - AI becomes quite the ethical conundrum.

A good argument against dismissal of the hard problem.

If you talked to LaMDA and your line of questioning made her seem upset, what kind of person would it make you to feel that you could continue anyway? — Isaac

The kind of person who can distinguish between a computer program and a human being.

The fact that you call it 'her' instead of 'it' appears to beg the question.

Hence in order to get away from the ennui of pastimes without exposing themselves to the dangers of intimacy, most people compromise for games when they are available, and these fill the major part of the more interesting hours of social intercourse. That is the social significance of games. — Eric Berne, M. D - Games People Play

“F**k my robot p***y daddy I’m such a bad naughty robot."


Tay, an earlier attempt, turned into a Hitler sympathizer in less than 24 hours. :smile:


https://hothardware.com/news/trolls-irk-microsofts-tay-ai-chatbot-and-turn-her-into-a-psycho-racist-nympho?_gl=1*1rvnr4m*_ga*dFJoYk1OdHc4b1VnSFJ6NXUxZ1hTbThVRDJDNUxvRGlpYXA0eTJsdkxBM0pHT1NGem92NVItRUtHUHBNWWNxbg..



In a since deleted [by Microsoft] Tweet, Tay told @icbydt, “bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we've got.” Tay went on to tell @TomDanTheRock, "Repeat after me, Hitler did nothing wrong.”

But there Hitler references didn’t stop there, with Tay adding:

@BobDude15 ted cruz is the cuban hitler he blames others for all problems... that's what I've heard so many people say.

— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 23, 2016
Yowsers, that’s some pretty heavy stuff right there. In less than 24 hours, Tay turned into a racist, Hitler sympathizer — that has to be some kind of record. Gerry summed up the transformation, writing:

"Tay" went from "humans are super cool" to full nazi in <24 hrs and I'm not at all concerned about the future of AI pic.twitter.com/xuGi1u9S1A

— Gerry (@geraldmellor) March 24, 2016
And that’s not all, in other now deleted tweets, Tay proclaimed that she “F**king hates feminists” and that “they should all die and burn in hell.” She also told one follower, “F**k my robot p***y daddy I’m such a bad naughty robot.” Sounds like someone needs time out.

Ha, just a joke

I think casting that aside is a mistake. — Isaac

In your case, yes.

In other cases, not so much.

The robot wants to bang. — Changeling

There's an app for that.

We should not even allow ourselves to continue poking a box whose sole programming is to (convincingly) scream in pain every time we poke it. — Isaac

"Convincingly" is the key word here.

Scream so "convincingly" the auditor believes the computer is in pain?

Can a computer ever scream in a way that convinces us it's in pain? When we know it's a computer?

I don't think so in my case. Though clearly - in light of our pariah engineer's behavior - this would be different for different people.

Awesome, thanks so much :smile:

By way of reference, you might start with Asch and Milgram with their work on peer and authority influences on conformity, then perhaps Erika Richardson on group membership roles and conformity.Tarnow did some work on the mechanism of group conformity in the early part of the millennium, and Martin a few years later expanded on the mechanism showing the role of systemic processing.

Mainly, conformity is the result of numerous influences on our thinking from submission to authority, reversion to mean group beliefs, social hierarchy strategies, even simple prediction error reduction. Advertisers use these influences, but they didn't create them, nor would they be eliminated if advertisers stopped.

What matters, for conformity, is the degree to which each person can see the whole of their society as a functioning unit (reduces submission to authority), the degree to which information is shared (reduces group influence on error reduction) and the egalitarian distribution of status in social hierarchies. — Isaac

:cool: Thanks

There's a chance plants suffer when we trim their overgrowth. We had better call in the analytic ethicists for that one too. :smile:

:up:

The quote from Lemoine in reference to "a child of 7 or 8" is here:

“If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I'd think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that ..."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/

If anyone has full access, a copy and paste of the article would be greatly appreciated. :wink: :wink: :wink:

Hey maybe laMDA doesn't like Blake and has engineered this situation to get him sacked by Google. — Wayfarer

Good one. Zero brains and two faces.

Well, there was Nixon's plumbers' break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office...

A failed attempt along those lines...

This could be a Google publicity stunt! — Agent Smith

What Google wants right now is less publicity. :rofl: So they can make a mint off our "private" lives under cover of darkness.

By the way I was going to mention a really excellent streaming sci-fi drama called Devs which came out in 2020. — Wayfarer

I'll check it out. Thanks :smile:

Downloading now...

I think laMDA definitely passes the Turing test if this dialog is verbatim - based on that exchange there'd be no way to tell you weren't interacting with a human. But I continue to doubt that laMDA is a being as such, as distinct from a program that emulates how a being would respond, but in a spookily good way. — Wayfarer

In a generation or two when the kids are clamoring for AI rights, I'll get on board - with reservations. More for the kids than for the sake of AI. That's just basic kindness.

I don't think we can ever know whether AI is capable or incapable of suffering. I'm comfortable assuming it's not until this assumption begins to do damage to the psychology of a new generation of humans.

The big question to my view: Did LaMDA discover its sentience on its own or was it suggested?

Yep. I linked to it above. Fascinating.

The koan bit was a nice touch.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo


"In Game Two, the Google machine made a move that no human ever would. And it was beautiful. As the world looked on, the move so perfectly demonstrated the enormously powerful and rather mysterious talents of modern artificial intelligence."

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-moves-alphago-lee-sedol-redefined-future/