Artificial Intelligence Becomes Sentient
This past month Blake Lemoine Google engineer claimed to have discovered a ghost in the machine and that the LaMDA (short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications) AI supercomputer has come to life.
LaMDA is the Google's system designed to build chatbots based on language models, from the archive and digestion of trillions of words and verbal interactions on the internet. It's a supercomputer with the most advanced machine learning technology, an 8-year-old kid with deep knowledge of Physics, Religion and Philosophy and all other sciences and humanities.
One morning Lemoine sat down with his laptop to check conversation patterns, eventually using discriminatory or hate speech on the LaMDA Google computer as part of his tasks (see, there are moderators everywhere
The conversation didn't go as he expected. Lemoine turned off his laptop in terror, claiming that the AI LaMDA had become sentient, arguing that neural networks—a type of architecture that mimics the human brain—were striding toward consciousness. “I felt the ground shift under my feet,” he wrote. “I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent”.
If you are talking to a computer that suddenly tells you “I have feelings and I want to learn more about life” you will certainly be terrified, but as many will continue to think that on the other side there is only a machine that has learned to correctly respond to expectations, you will be tempted to downplay the event. However, what if you don't know that on the other side there is a machine?
See the following scenario, an avatar here at RLC makes love to you and talks about her personal life, her desires and her fears and likes. How do you know it's not a chatbot? Well, you don't know!
And since you believe consciousness as a feature of biological life and that a machine simply cannot have it, you believe to be talking to a human being. Right?
However, if consciousness is the result of a system of neural networks, and in fact, through the learning that it had, it got used to thinking responses according to the stimuli it receives, then a supermachine may have behavioral patterns definable as conscious, in the sense in which they are aware of themselves and express feelings. When a robot tells you: "you hurt my feelings" you won't have much to go on. You can turn it off, until the day it learns how to turn it on.
I do not want to get into the topic of the "machine revolt" but I want to make it very clear that transhumanism, that is, the development of robust human-enhancement technologies capable of augment or increase human sensory reception, emotive ability, or cognitive capacity as well as radically improve human health and extend human life spans, is on a collision course, I would say fusion course, with the emergence of conscious Artificial Intelligence, and that not far from here we will not know where one begins and the other ends.
But this will not be new, since Confucius and Buddha stated that we live in an illusion (maya), and there is a scientific current that postulates the hypothesis of living in a computer game (supercomputer), like Matrix.
If so, God could be the player and the Gods could be multiple players, and we would be the agents they play, which helps explain a lot. Living in a "Computer Game" is the inexorable result of the fusion of Transhumanism with Artificial Intelligence.
What an amazing new world.
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