# Google employee says they have sentient AI

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069
**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:** 1
**Showing post:** 220

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### 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 21, 2022, 7:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-employee-says-they-have-sentient-ai/966069/220 "2022-06-21T07:06:00Z")

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> [@wolfpup](#):
>
> I believe you’ve exactly captured the central issue that @Half_Man_Half_Wit and I have argued about in the past, which I certainly don’t want to relitigate again here. But that’s pretty much it. I may be misremembering the details, and at the risk of oversimplifying, HMHW thoroughly rejects the idea of emergent properties, which I believe are fundamental to understanding how intelligence and, ultimately, self-awareness arises from underlying components like neurons and logic gates that manifestly lack those properties.

Not to rehash a stale debate, but that’s not my position at all. I do believe consciousness emerges from a nonconscious fundamental stratum—in fact, I’ve [published a theory](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-021-00467-w) detailing how it does so (which didn’t really [arouse much interest here](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/conscious-experience-is-self-representational-access-to-intrinsic-properties/954814)). My point to you was merely that emergence isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card to get anything to come from anything else—it’s not a magic wand you can wave to get water to break from bare rock. You need the right sort of ingredients, and you need an account of how the combination of those ingredients makes it so that the property under discussion emerges—otherwise, you’re merely stating an article of faith, that it just needs those ingredients and nothing else.

People used to believe that life could be [spontaneously generated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation) from dead matter. Fleas could come from dust; maggots from dead flesh; geese [grew on trees](https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/03/barnacle-goose-bird-that-was-believed.html) (OK, so the latter isn’t exactly from nonliving matter, I just love the image). You might say, that’s perfectly reasonable: those living beings just emerge. But what have you actually said by that? Without any mechanism, nothing of any content whatsoever—you’ve merely reformulated the original belief. It doesn’t add anything, explain anything, or give anybody any reason to believe the claim.

> [@wolfpup](#):
>
> To simplify to a kind of _reductio ad absurdum_, proponents of this philosophy would say that if a computer can answer Jeopardy questions well enough to beat the best humans, or play grandmaster-level chess, or carry on an amazingly human-like conversation, then those capabilities must somehow have already existed in the individual logic gates.

Yeah, this has no grounding in any form of panpsychism anybody actually defends. The object of panpsychism is phenomenal consciousness, which has nothing to do with Jeopardy or chess-playing.

> [@wolfpup](#):
>
> Things like this are why computer scientists and philosophers who opine about their work are so often at odds.

It works just as well the other way around: computer scientists routinely opine about philosophical topics, such as what is or isn’t conscious or sentient—but, not typically being experts on the matter, get things often wrong. Which isn’t really a problem—after all, it’s not their working area—but one ought to expect a bit more recognition of the expertise of those whose working area it is.

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