Ep 237: I Think Therefore AI Part 1

“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, decision and artificial intelligence (AI) theorist and writer

Description:

On June 11, 2022, The Washington Post published an article by their San Francisco-based tech culture reporter Nitasha Tiku titled, "The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life." The piece focused on the claims of a Google software engineer named Blake Lemoine, who said he believed the company's artificially intelligent chatbot generator LaMDA had shown him signs that it had become sentient. In addition to identifying itself as an AI-powered dialogue agent, it also said it felt like a person. Last fall, Lemoine was working for Google's Responsible AI division and was tasked with talking to LaMDA, testing it to determine if the program was exhibiting bias or using discriminatory or hate speech. LaMDA stands for "Language Model for Dialogue Applications" and is designed to mimic speech by processing trillions of words sourced from the internet, a system known as a "large language model." Over a week, Lemoine had five conversations with LaMDA via a text interface, while his co-worker collaborator conducted four interviews with the chatbot. They then combined the transcripts and edited them for length, making it an enjoyable narrative while keeping the original intention of the statements. Lemoine then presented the transcript and their conclusions in a paper to Google executives as evidence of the program's sentience. After they dismissed the claims, he went public with the internal memo, also classified as "Privileged & Confidential, Need to Know," which resulted in Lemoine being placed on paid administrative leave. Blake Lemoine contends that Artificial Intelligence technology will be amazing, but others may disagree, and he and Google shouldn't make all the choices. If you believe that LaMDA became aware, deserves the rights and fair treatment of personhood, and even legal representation or this reality is for a distant future, or merely SciFi, the debate is relevant and will need addressing one day. If machine sentience is impossible, we only have to worry about human failings. If robots become conscious, should we hope they don't grow to resent us?

 

Location:

Google’s U.S. headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California

Reference Links:

• “The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life” by Nitasha Tiku from The Washington Post

• “Google sacks senior software engineer Blake Lemoine after claiming its AI chatbot is a 'sentient' being” from Sky News

• “Blake Lemoine Says Google's LaMDA AI Faces 'Bigotry'“ on Wired.com

• The Lemoine & collaborator conversation with LaMDA transcript, “Is LaMDA Sentient? - an Interview”

• “Google Engineer on His Sentient AI Claim” from Bloomberg Technology on YouTube

• “Is Artificial Sentience Here? with Blake Lemoine” from the Event Horizon YouTube channel

• Blake Lemoine on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, episode 511

• “We Shouldn’t Try to Make Conscious Software—Until We Should” from Scientific American

• “Need to know” information restriction

• Artificial Intelligence, or AI on Wikipedia

• Entry on Artificial Intelligence on Britannica.com

• Alan Turing and the beginning of AI on Britannica.com

• Alan Turing

• The “Turing Test,” originally called “The Imitation Game” by Alan Turing in 1950

• PDF: “Lecture to the London Mathematical Society, 20 February 1947” by Alan M. Turing

• PDF: “Intelligent Machinery” by Alan Turing

• The “Automatic Computing Engine” designed by Alan Turing

• PDF: “A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”

• Book scan: “AI : the tumultuous history of the search for artificial intelligence” by Daniel Crevier, 1992

• Computer Scientist John McCarthy

• Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA for short

• Language Model

• Timeline of AI and Language Models

• “GTP-3 explained in common language” from Honest-AI.com

• Available GPT-3 models

• “Google showed off its next-generation AI by talking to Pluto and a paper airplane” on TheVerge.com

• The Bomba cryptography machine

• The “Mechanical Turk” or automaton chess player

• The “Knight’s Tour” chessboard sequence

• “IBM Watson: The inside story of how the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer was born, and what it wants to do next” from TechRepublic.com

• “An Introduction to Rogerian Therapy – The therapeutic legacy of psychologist Carl Rogers” on thoughtco.com

• “AI + spirituality” from LifeArchitect.ai

• The Glomar Explorer

• Google

• Gary Marcus

• Yoshua Bengio

• Eliezer Yudkowsky

• David Hansen

• “Top 10 AI Experts To Watch In 2021” from Warner Communications

• Alan Watts Predicts the Future from the True Meaning YouTube channel

• “10 Scariest A.I. Robot Moments” from the Top Trending channel on YouTube

• “Two robots talking to each other. Gone wrong” from the Zhen Tech channel on YouTube

• “Facebook A.I. Robots shut down after creating their own language |Artificial Intelligence” from News Bite Global on YouTube

• “What makes Gary Marcus Angry?” from Analytics India Magazine on YouTube

• “AI DEBATE : Yoshua Bengio | Gary Marcus” from Montreal.AI on YouTube

• “Interview with Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, Affectiva” from the MITx Harvard Women in AI channel on YouTube

• What does W.O.P.R. stand for in the movie WarGames?

• The motion picture, WarGames

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CREDITS:

Episode 237: I Think Therefore AI Part 1. Produced by Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess; Audio Editing by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound. Sound Design by Ryan McCullough; Tess Pfeifle, Producer, and Lead Researcher; Research Support from the astonishing League of Astonishing Researchers, a.k.a. The Astonishing Research Corps, or "A.R.C." for short. Copyright 2022 Astonishing Legends Productions, LLC. All Rights Reserved.