Consciousness, or no consciousness?
Read moreRecently, A very interesting conversation took place between a Google engineer and an AI program called Lamda. After the conversation, the engineer believed LaMDA had become sentient – meaning it can “feel” emotions and has consciousness.
Google said the evidence their engineer presented did not support his claims, and he was placed on paid leave for violating Google’s confidentiality policy.
In 2021, Google called LaMDA their “breakthrough conversation technology.” It’s a machine that was explicitly made to provide the most human-like answers. That was the goal, so should we be surprised if it succeeds in doing that? We designed it with this goal in mind.
While LaMDA is unlikely to be a person, experts believe that an artificial person is on the way, whether in five, fifteen, or fifty years.
However, the engineer has made his conversation with Lamda public. Even if you are not educated enough in this area to make any call on whether LaMDA is sentient, after reading the conversation, some will surely root for it!
So what do you think?
Basically, it is a machine learning-powered chatbot designed to speak generally about any topic. According to researchers, artificial intelligence models have so much data that they can sound human, but superior language skills do not demonstrate sentience.
As humans, we are easily tricked. One of the story’s morals is that more safeguards are needed to prevent us from mistaking machines for humans. Increasingly machines are going to fool us. This will be especially prevalent and problematic in the metaverse. Many of the “lifeforms” we’ll encounter there will be artificial.
LaMDA will never fall in love, mourn the loss of a parent, or be bothered by the absurdity of life. It will continue to assemble random phrases from the internet. This makes LaMBDA clearly a serial liar.
If LaMDA is just a perfect chatbot, responding to questions as it is programmed to, it is fantastic how far Google’s got with AI and NLP. Is LaMDA sentient? Gradually the gap between the believers and the deniers will disappear. Quite the achievement, but so many implications.
Read the conversations that helped convince a Google engineer an artificial intelligence chatbot had become sentient – conscious. For some, the whole conversation is chilling in an indescribable way, and for others, cool.
Source: The Guardian