Ep 238: I Think Therefore AI Part 2

“It is no one but whomever it thinks you want it to be.”

— From an essay on LaMDA in the online publication "Noema" by Benjamin Bratton and Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Description:

As we continue our discussion based on Blake Lemoine’s assertion that the Large Language Model chatbot LaMDA had become sentient, we relay the rest of his conversation with the program and then some questions and answers with Lemoine himself. But as Lemoine has said, machine sentience and personhood are just some of many questions to be considered. His greater issue is how an omnipresent AI, trained on an insufficient data set, will affect how different people and cultures interact and who will be dominated or excluded. The fear is that the ultimate result of protecting corporate profits will outweigh global human interests. In light of these questions about AI’s ethical and efficient development, we highlight the positions and insights of experts on the state and future of AI, such as Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Gary Marcus. The directives of responsible technology development and the right track to Deep Learning are more grounded than the fantastical thoughts of killer robots. Yet hovering over all of the mechanics are the philosophies of what constitutes sentience, comprehending and feeling as a person does, and being human enough. The reality of Artificial Intelligence matching humans may be fifty years in the future, or five hundred, but if that day ever comes, let’s hope it’s an egalitarian future where we are the masters and not the servants.

 

Location:

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

Reference Links:

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

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

• Blaise Agüera y Arcas

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

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

• The Trolley Problem

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

• Chinese Room

• Artificial General Intelligence

• Benjamin H. Bratton

• “The Model Is The Message” on NOEMA

• “Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Melanie Mitchell: How Close Are We to AI?” from Town Hall Seattle on YouTube

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

• “Redness Reconsidered: Materialism, Universals, and Abstract Objects of Thought” from Evolution News & Science Today

• “Universals” from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• “Opinion: Are robots masters of strategy, and also grudges?” from Scott Simon on NPR

• “Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence” on medium.com

• “Do we see reality as it is?” Donald Hoffman’s TED Talk on YouTube

• “AI + spirituality” from LifeArchitect.ai

• Reductive materialism on psychology.fandom.com

• Type physicalism or reductive materialism

• “Platonism in Metaphysics” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• Definition of qualia

• “How is Consciousness Possible in a Natural World?”

• The Good Robot – University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies podcast

• “Blaise Agüera y Arcas on Debunking Myths in Technology: Intelligence, Survival, Sexuality”

  on The Good Robot podcast

• “Margaret Mitchell on Large Language Models and Misogyny in Tech” on the Good Robot podcast

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

• “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

• “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

• The Glomar Explorer

• Google

• Gary Marcus

• Yoshua Bengio

• Eliezer Yudkowsky

• David Hansen

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

• “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

• “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

• “John Cleese & Ed Kelly discuss survival of consciousness beyond death” from the

  UVA Division of Perceptual Studies YouTube channel

Join us on Patreon!

Click HERE or go to patreon.com/astonishinglegends to become one of our Patreon members and receive exclusive offerings, like our bonus Astonishing Junk Drawer episodes (posted every weekend the main show is dark) commercial-free episodes, and more!

Special Events:

Come join us for Seth Breedlove & Small Town Monsters’, MONSTER FEST 2023 coming June of next year! Click HERE for details!

Click here to get Stan Gordon’s new book!

〰️

Click here to get Stan Gordon’s new book! 〰️

Stan Gordon's new book, "Creepy Cryptids and Strange UFO Encounters of Pennsylvania: Bigfoot, Thunderbirds, Mysteries of Chestnut Ridge, and more, Casebook Four

Related Books:

SPECIAL OFFERS FROM OUR SPECIAL SPONSORS:

FIND OTHER GREAT DEALS FROM OUR SHOW’S SPONSORS BY CLICKING HERE!

CREDITS:

Episode 238: I Think Therefore AI Part 2. 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.