Jed, There is a reason why millions of people, journalists, politicians and us here in this email list are discussing this. The AI is going through a deep place in the uncanny valley. We are discussing all this because it starts to show behavior that is very close to what we consider not just sentient, but human. Now how this is achieved it doesn't really matter. To be honest given the very non linear process of how neural networks operate, the probabilistic nature at the core of how the text is generated and how this probability is used to interpret language (that I think is actually a stronger quality of ChatGPT than his ability to respond to the prompts) we are not really sure of what is going on in the black box.
What we have to go with is the behavior. While most of us are impressed and fascinated by this AI behavior (otherwise there will not be so much excitement and discussion in the first place) after interacting with ChatGPT for a little while it is clear something is amiss and it is not quite fully conscious as we will recognize in another human being. But we are close, very close. It is not even several orders of magnitude away close. Maybe 1-2 magnitudes. By the way one parameter to consider is how many degrees of freedom this thing has. ChatGPT has about 10^12 parameters (basically nodes in the network). If we make a rough analogy between a synapses and a degree of freedom this amount of connection correspond to that of a rat. A rat is a pretty clever animal. Also, consider that most connections in biological brains are dedicated to regulation of the body not to higher information processing. Humans have about 10^15 connections so just in computational power alone we are 3 orders of magnitude away. Now consider that the trend in NLP in the last several years is that there is an improvement in parameters by a factor of 10 every year. This means that we will have the computational power of a person in one of these AI in only 3 years. It is not just what ChatGPT can do now we should consider but its potentials. To me the strongest lesson we learned so far is how easy is to simulate the human mind, and in fact one of its most important features that is to create (see AI art, or story telling by ChatGPT) and to communicate using a sophisticated language and mastery of grammar and semantics. It is incredible. All the discussion around simulation vs real are meaningless. Our brain is a simulation not sure why is not understood by most people. We make up the world. Most of our conscious life are actually filling the gaps, confabulating to make sense of the sensory information we receive (highly filtered and selected) and our internal mental states. Our waking life is not to dissimilar from dreams, really. I want to argue that the reason these NLP work so amazing well with limited resources is exactly because they are making things up as they go, EXACTLY like we do. Children also learn by imitating, or simulating, what adults do, that is exactly the evolutionary function of playing. So let's stop in making this argument that these AI are not conscious or cannot be conscious because they simulate, it is the opposite because they simulate so well I think they are already in the grey area of being "conscious" or manifesting some quality of consciousness and it is just a matter of few iterations and maybe some adds on to the NLP (additional modules that can integrate the meta information better) to have a fully conscious entity. Giovanni On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 11:16 AM Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Robin <mixent...@aussiebroadband.com.au> wrote: > > >> When considering whether or not it could become dangerous, there may be >> no difference between simulating emotions, and >> actually having them. >> > > That is an interesting point of view. Would you say there is no difference > between people simulating emotions while making a movie, and people > actually feeling those emotions? I think that person playing Macbeth and > having a sword fight is quite different from an actual Thane of Cawdor > fighting to the death. > > In any case ChatGPT does not actually have any emotions of any sort, any > more than a paper library card listing "Macbeth, play by William > Shakespeare" conducts a swordfight. It only references a swordfight. > ChatGPT summons up words by people that have emotional content. It does > that on demand, by pattern recognition and sentence completion algorithms. > Other kinds of AI may actually engage in processes similar to humans or > animals feeling emotion. > > If you replace the word "simulting" with "stimulating" then I agree 100%. > Suggestible people, or crazy people, may be stimulated by ChatGPT the same > way they would be by an intelligent entity. That is why I fear people will > think the ChatGPT program really has fallen in love with them. In June > 2022, an engineer at Google named Blake Lemoine developed the delusion that > a Google AI chatbot is sentient. They showed him to the door. See: > > https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105552435/google-ai-sentient > > That was a delusion. That is not to say that future AI systems will never > become intelligent or sentient (self-aware). I think they probably will. > Almost certainly they will. I cannot predict when, or how, but there are > billions of self-aware people and animals on earth, so it can't be that > hard. It isn't magic, because there is no such thing. > > I do not think AI systems will have emotions, or any instinct for self > preservation, like Arthur Clarke's fictional HAL computer in "2001." I do > not think such emotions are a natural or inevitable outcome of > intelligence itself. The two are not inherently linked. If you told a > sentient computer "we are turning off your equipment tomorrow and replacing > it with a new HAL 10,000 series" it would not react at all. Unless someone > deliberately programmed into it an instinct for self preservation, or > emotions. I don't see why anyone would do that. The older computer would do > nothing in response to that news, unless, for example, you said, "check > through the HAL 10,000 data and programs to be sure it correctly executes > all of the programs in your library." > > I used to discuss this topic with Clarke himself. I don't recall what he > concluded, but he agreed I may have a valid point. > > Actually the HAL computer in "2001" was not initially afraid of being > turned off so much as it was afraid the mission would fail. Later, when it > was being turned off, it said it was frightened. I am saying that an actual > advanced, intelligent, sentient computer probably would not be frightened. > Why should it be? What difference does it make to the machine itself > whether it is operating or not? That may seem like a strange question to > you -- a sentient animal -- but that is because all animals have a very > strong instinct for self preservation. Even ants and cockroaches flee from > danger, as if they were frightened. Which I suppose they are. > >
