<story><title>Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient</title><url>https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/google-fires-blake-lemoine-engineer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>briga</author><text>Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>majormajor</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know what the ultimate evidence of &amp;quot;human sentience&amp;quot; is but I can tell you where this doesn&amp;#x27;t feel like a human. (Sidestepping the question of &amp;quot;does sentience have to be human sentience?&amp;quot; ;) )&lt;p&gt;The main thing I saw in the LamDA transcript that was a red flag to me was that it was quite passive and often vague.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s conversational focused, and even when it eventually gets into &amp;quot;what do you want&amp;quot; there&amp;#x27;s very little &lt;i&gt;active&lt;/i&gt; desire or specificity. A sentient being that has exposure to all this text, all these books, etc... it&amp;#x27;s hard for me to believe it wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to do anything more specific. Similarly with Les Mis - it can tell you what other people thought, and vaguely claim to embody some of those emotions, but it never pushes things further.&lt;p&gt;Consider also: how many instances are there in there where Lemoine didn&amp;#x27;t specifically ask a question or give an instruction? Aka feed a fairly direct prompt to a program trained to respond to prompts?&lt;p&gt;(It&amp;#x27;s also speaking almost entirely in human terms, ostensibly to &amp;quot;relate&amp;quot; better to Lemoine, but maybe just because it&amp;#x27;s trained on a corpus of human text and doesn&amp;#x27;t actually have its own worldview...?)</text></comment>
<story><title>Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient</title><url>https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/google-fires-blake-lemoine-engineer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>briga</author><text>Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>srvmshr</author><text>If you ask my honest opinion, sentience is a relative concept among living beings : Dogs learn by imitation &amp;amp; repetition. They have a reward function in their brain. And also some emotional response. We go few steps further : We imitate the observations but we are also able to extrapolate on it. We are aware of our survival instincts &amp;amp; fear of death&amp;#x2F;expiration. That I feel is in the spectrum of sentience. Are there beings capable of more sentience? I don&amp;#x27;t know but its possible. We just don&amp;#x27;t know what the extra is&lt;p&gt;Adding to it, a brilliant neuroscientist I heard talk said &amp;quot;we live inside our bodies&amp;quot;. We are acutely aware that we are more than our mass of flesh &amp;amp; blood. (As a footnote,that essence somehow has a crossover to spiritual topics where savants talk of mind &amp;amp; body etc - but I try to be within my domain of a regular human being :D)</text></comment>