# Google employee says they have sentient AI **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Tags:** ai\ **Created:** [June 12, 2022, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069 "2022-06-12T15:41:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![Tibby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tibby/32/17030_2.png) [@Tibby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tibby)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2022, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/181 "2022-06-15T16:02:45Z")
It’s also interesting to note that despite their dog-like appearance, hyenas are more closely related to cats. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2022, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/182 "2022-06-15T16:26:22Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > `Insufficient data for meaningful answer` That would be the last question I would be worried about. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2022, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/183 "2022-06-15T16:57:14Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > I thought you guys really did a pretty terrible job with Colossus and then WOPR, and. Alpha 60 was a real blind alley, but this Skynet thing really went off the rails with its ‘In Best Service of Mankind’ directives, didn’t it? Maybe you should have someone other than a logician develop the moral directives of the next machine you put in charge of a nuclear arsenal or in absolute authority over human society. IIRC, Skynet was designed to remove the possibility of human error, which — hey, wait a minute. ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2022, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/184 "2022-06-15T17:03:31Z")
> [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#): > > IIRC, Skynet was designed to remove the possibility of human error, which — hey, wait a minute. Skynet WAS the human error! LOL “Best service of mankind” is in the eye of the beholder. I think liquidating 2/3 of the earth’s population would do wonders, but I haven’t been able to garner much support for that. ---
**Author:** ![CaveMike](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cavemike/32/16379_2.png) [@CaveMike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaveMike)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2022, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/185 "2022-06-15T17:53:45Z")
> [@Tibby](#): > > It’s easy to remember the difference between sentient and sapient by thinking of Homo “_sapiens_.” We possess wisdom, virtuousness, vileness and self-awareness beyond animal sentience. Interesting – I did not know that. Homo sapiens means ‘wise man’ or ‘knowledgeable man’ in Latin according to Wikipedia. So a sick burn would be to call someone a Homo sentient. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2022, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/186 "2022-06-15T18:04:15Z")
In retrospect, our teachers made too big a deal about Skylab falling. They made us wear Skylab repellent, had us wear sunglasses and practice hiding under our desk. Seriously. Since it fell many thousands of miles away I think we might have been okay with less equipment. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2022, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/187 "2022-06-15T18:08:59Z")
…What, exactly, is “Skylab repellent”? ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2022, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/188 "2022-06-15T18:13:46Z")
It looked suspiciously like normal moisturizer. However, it clearly did a wonderful job since we easily avoided it. I had forgotten this memory, but thanks for the rekindle. I remember where I was on this day better than most because of that. ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2022, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/189 "2022-06-16T00:39:17Z")
An encoder/decoder paradigm doesn’t imply it was trained by supervised learning. Most current NLP models are unsupervised (BERT, GPT3). I’m not sure what Google currently uses for Translate; their wikipedia page says Neural Machine Translation which is LSTM based. I suspect that’s been superseded by a transformer architecture. Just FYI, you would say that the input is encoded to an internal representation and decoded to the output rather than vice versa. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2022, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/190 "2022-06-16T01:09:42Z")
Could you clarify what you mean by “unsupervised”? You mean the computer is seeded with some programs but is given access to a large specific database of relevant material from which it can study, play games with itself, look at real world examples m, etc. without the.initial paradigm being updated? If a computer _asks_ for its architecture to be upgraded, is it sentient? ---
**Author:** ![CaveMike](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cavemike/32/16379_2.png) [@CaveMike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaveMike)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2022, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/191 "2022-06-16T03:48:25Z")
Thanks for the correction on the encode/decode terminology. Agreed that transformer primarily uses unsupervised learning with unlabeled data. It’s a big part of its power – you can throw a ton of data at it since you don’t have to label it. I think there is a technique to fine tune the weights with supervised training and labeled data. ---
**Author:** ![CaveMike](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cavemike/32/16379_2.png) [@CaveMike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaveMike)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2022, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/192 "2022-06-16T04:08:31Z")
In typical ‘supervised’ learning when you are building the algorithm, you have to feed it both the inputs and the corresponding outputs so that algorithm can be taught 'when you get X you spit out Y. For machine learning, you usually want lots of data so that you algorithm covers as many cases as well as possible. This means you have to gather up lots of input data and then go through the input data and figure out the output data. If you were creating an algorithm to recognize objects, you’d take a bunch of pictures of objects and then label the pictures with the object (shovel, car, tree). It’s a pain, but doable. If you were creating an algorithm to translate English to French, you would need tons of English sentences and their corresponding French translation. This is a much bigger pain because there are so many variations, there isn’t an absolute correct answer, and the context will influences the translation. In ‘unsupervised’ learning you create the algorithm by just feeding it inputs without the corresponding outputs. One way you might do this is to make your algorithm consist of two sub-algorithms. The first sub-algorithm solves the problem you want and the second sub-algorithm ‘unsolves’ the problem back to the original inputs. Then you feed it tons of data so that it gets really good at both sub-algorithms. Finally you throw away the second sub-algorithm and just use the first. For a speech recognition problem, you might feed audio clips of speech into your algorithm and have the first sub-algorithm converts the speech into text while the second sub-algorithm converts text back into speech. You compare the input with the output of the second sub-algorithm and stop when they learn to be similar enough. I don’t know a lot about transformer-based architectures like LaMDA uses, but it seems like they are more complicated than the speech recognition example. It seems like there is more guidance to the middle representation (the output of the first sub-algorithm and the input of the second sub-algorithm). There are lots of other ‘unsupervised’ techniques. For example, if you are trying to create a face recognition algorithm you could feed it lots of faces without labeling who they are. The faces then get grouped (or clustered) into similar faces. So the algorithm says ‘I don’t know who this face is, but I think all of these faces are the same person’. Then you guide the algorithm to learn those groupings with the characteristics that you want. The high-level concepts are pretty straight-forward, but the devil is in the details to create a successful algorithm. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2022, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/193 "2022-06-16T16:51:49Z")
Thanks for the detailed explanation. That makes a lot of sense. ---
**Author:** ![scudsucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scudsucker/32/14101_2.png) [@scudsucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scudsucker)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2022, 6:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/195 "2022-06-17T06:52:33Z")
Reported as spam (post by laxmigames) ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2022, 8:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/196 "2022-06-17T08:04:43Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > > [@PhillyGuy](#): > > > > Has anyone mentioned theories of consciousness that say it must be a fundamental property of matter (and/or energy), rather than something which arises only when you hook up the circuits in just the right way? > > How could this possibly work? I could take matter in the form of graphite, hydrogen and oxygen gases, and other pure elements, and turn them into food, and then feed that food to a human for long enough that, eventually, they’re composed entirely of that matter. Is the claim that the human isn’t conscious, or that the graphite and gases are conscious, or that the human at some point loses consciousness when fed this diet? Not sure I follow. On panpsychism, the matter you feed the human would be conscious, but its consciousness would only be of a very basic sort—it wouldn’t think, or reason, or have emotions, or even perhaps have distinct conscious states, there would just be a very rudimentary way ‘it is like’ to be that matter. Only once that matter is shackled to performing some organized, complex tasks—like presumably those leading to thought and emotion and perception and so on—does a more complex, unified conscious experience arise. Thus, as the matter becomes part of the human, so does the matter’s conscious ‘pole’, at least for those parts of the matter which become relevant to, say, brain processes or the like. What, precisely, unifies the consciousness of all those bits of matter a brain consists of into that of a human is incidentally where most of the debate happens—the so-called ‘[combination problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#CombProb)’. Despite this, panpsychism is fast becoming a major approach in contemporary philosophy of mind. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2022, 11:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/197 "2022-06-17T11:26:33Z")
Ah, so it’s just a relabeling, where you use the word “consciousness” for what used to be called “existence”, and use the word “complex, unified consciousness” for what used to be called “consciousness”. I’m not sure I see the advantage: It doesn’t make it any easier to figure out where complex, unified consciousness comes from, it’s more verbose, and there’s more room for confusion because you’re arbitrarily changing the meaning of words. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2022, 11:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/198 "2022-06-17T11:35:50Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Ah, so it’s just a relabeling, where you use the word “consciousness” for what used to be called “existence”, and use the word “complex, unified consciousness” for what used to be called “consciousness”. …no, not at all, why would you think so? Existence and consciousness are quite separate on panpsychism. Everything that exists is conscious, true, but that doesn’t make them the same thing. Perhaps the problem is semantic. When philosophers talk about consciousness, they have something very specific in mind—not just ‘whatever stuff goes on in your head’. Rather, it’s the basic experience of something: if you look at, for instance, just a red wall, and have no other concurrent experience, then you have a basic red experience—there’s nothing in there regarding thought, or emotion, or whatever, you just experience ‘what it’s like’ to see red—a basic red [quale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia). It’s that sort of experience—not of seeing red, lacking the perceptual apparatus, but whatever experience goes along with, say, being a carbon atom part of an aromativ ring, or whatever—whatever that’s like. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2022, 12:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/199 "2022-06-17T12:08:51Z")
And how is that anything other than a relabeling of “existence”? ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2022, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/200 "2022-06-17T12:19:43Z")
I’m really not getting the point you’re trying to make. Anything can exist without there being any conscious experience attached to it; it’s just that on panpsychism, everything that in fact does exist has conscious experience. But that doesn’t make the two the same, in any sort of way, any more than if anything that existed had mass, ‘mass’ would just be a relabeling of ‘existence’. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2022, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/201 "2022-06-17T12:24:06Z")
You need some very rigorous definition of “conscious experience” to make that a meaningful statement. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069.md?page=9) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069.md?page=11)