[FRIAM] GPT-3 and the chinese room

Tue Jul 28 00:32:35 EDT 2020

Nick,

That's really funny.  It reminds me of a long complex joke that ends, "I
wouldn't send a knight out on a dog like this."

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 10:11 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Frank,
>
>
>
> Well, yes.  Roughly, “if it quacks like a duck…”*.  But we have to
> understand “behavior” in a pretty broad sense.
>
>
>
> The rules of the game are, define “thinking” in some way that satisfies
> everybody in the room, once everybody agrees, look and see if the entity in
> question “thinks”.  But you have to be honest about it.   Obviously if
> everybody in the room agrees that thinking requires “posting to FRIAM”,
> then chimpanzees don’t think.  So really the whole project is in how you
> frame the question.  There are a lot of arguments that continue uselessly
> because people have illicit criteria for their definitions.  Many
> arguments  at FRIAM about consciousness continue more or less indefinitely
>  because some participants implicitly include in their definition  of
> consciousness the possession of an immortal soul or of a human brain, or
> both, but don’t own up those criteria.  Thus their belief that computers or
> chimpanzees, or blades of grass are not conscious arises from their
> premises, not from any facts of any matter.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
> * I once expressed a worry to a friend of mine concerning a Doctor we had
> both seen that the Doctor was not really qualified because he was
> constantly evading and deflecting my questions.  “Well,” my friend said.
> “If he ducks like a quack, he probably is one.”
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Frank Wimberly
> *Sent:* Monday, July 27, 2020 9:12 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] GPT-3 and the chinese room
>
>
>
> Smart computer (program).  Nick, is the behaviorist position that if it
> behaves as though it thinks than it thinks?
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 8:28 PM Alexander Rasmus <alex.m.rasmus at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> There's also a lot of stuff that isn't poetry. He generates Dwarf Fortress
> patch notes in the Misc section.
>
>
>
> There's even a section where GPT-3 argues that it doesn't really
> understand anything (bold at the start is a shortened version of the
> prompt):
>
> "*AI will never be able to truly* think for themselves, to have
> consciousness, to feel any of the richness and complexity of the world that
> we mere humans can feel. Mere, unenlightened humans might be impressed by
> the abilities of simple deep learning programs, but when looked at in a
> more holistic manner, it all adds up to… well, nothing. They still don’t
> exhibit any trace of consciousness. All of the available data support the
> notion that humans feel and experience the world differently than computers
> do. While a computer can beat a human master at chess or Go or some other
> game of structured rules, it will never be able to truly think outside of
> those rules, it will never be able to come up with its own new strategies
> on the fly, it will never be able to feel, to react, the way a human can.
> Artificial intelligence programs lack consciousness and self-awareness.
> They will never be able to have a sense of humor. They will never be able
> to appreciate art, or beauty, or love. They will never feel lonely. They
> will never have empathy for other people, for animals, for the environment.
> They will never enjoy music or fall in love, or cry at the drop of a hat.
> Merely by existing, mere, unenlightened humans are intellectually superior
> to computers, no matter how good our computers get at winning games like Go
> or Jeopardy. We don’t live by the rules of those games. Our minds are much,
> much bigger than that.
>
>
>
> Compared to the awesome power of the human intellect, it’s obvious that
> computers are just dense electrochemical machines with intricate wiring.
> And while one day we might develop smarter (though still soulless)
> computers that surpass the human intellect in the games mentioned above, it
> will just end up being some more sophisticated way of doing the same thing.
> Even if it’s more efficient than our brains at doing complex mathematical
> operations, it will remain entirely in the dark about what it all means.
> Mindless processing power alone is not the answer to our existential
> questions. So, in the end, we don’t need to create another HAL 9000, or
> Skynet, or some evil global intelligent network of computers that rule the
> world and try to exterminate humanity as we become obsolete, which is a
> pretty cool subplot for a future Terminator movie. We don’t need any of
> that. We’re humans, and we are already intellectually superior to machines.
> End of story.
>
>
>
> To be sure, I’m not denying that there are hard problems in AI. Of course,
> there are. All of these so called “advances” in this field are a bunch of
> crap if we still don’t have a program that can putt around on a
> miniaturized golf course all by itself, let alone actually play a decent
> game of golf like the humans do, without going into meltdown if it misses
> the hole five out of six times in a row. Can we get a movie about that? If
> you ask me, we don’t even really know how to define intelligence yet. How
> does it work, exactly? It’s a mess, really. If we’re ever going to create
> another actual HAL 9000, or yet another Skynet (what fun), we’d better be
> all on the same page when it comes to AI: what intelligence is, how it
> works, what consciousness is, what it feels like, what it really means to
> be self-aware. Without that common framework, trying to program yet another
> AI that can play yet another game like Go is like trying to blow up another
> Death Star with yet another way-too-large superlaser.
>
>
>
> I think one of the big mistakes that computer scientists are making is
> that they are conflating intelligence with problem-solving. They’ve gotten
> into this habit of creating intricate Turing test competitions: give the
> computer a series of math problems, a chess board, etc., etc., give it a
> chat interface so you can interact with it like you would with another
> human being, and then see if the machine can fool you into thinking that it
> is a human. Once it does this, computers will have passed the Turing test
> and achieved general AI. Really? Is that really the way it works? I don’t
> see how. A computer has succeeded in faking it until it makes it, in terms
> of passing a Turing test competition, only if it has satisfied some
> pre-specified set of conditions that we know to be what a human would do in
> the same situation. But that is no guarantee that it has actually achieved
> intelligence! For all we know, computers can imitate humans until they
> generate the most plausible patterns of thought and behavior we know of,
> while all along remaining as soulless as ever. Who’s to say that the
> computer doesn’t merely use its programming to cheat the test? Who’s to say
> that it isn’t just shuffling its data around in an effort to do the most
> computations possible with the least amount of effort? It may succeed in
> conning us into thinking that it is self-aware, but that doesn’t prove that
> it actually is. It hasn’t actually passed the Turing test, unless we have
> defined it in a way that pre-determines the outcome: i.e., if the human
> pretends to be a computer, then it passes the test, but if the computer
> pretends to be a human, then it doesn’t pass the test! To me, that just
> doesn’t sound all that scientific."
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Rasmus
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 8:04 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Excellent. Thanks! I'd seen the link to Gwern from Slate Star Codex. But I
> loathe poetry. Now that you've recommended it, I have no choice. 8^)
>
> On July 27, 2020 6:32:15 PM PDT, Alexander Rasmus <alex.m.rasmus at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >Glen,
> >
> >Gwern has an extensive post on GPT-3 poetry experimentation here:
> >https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3
> >
> >I strongly recommend the section on the Cyberiad, where GPT-3 stands in
> >for
> >Trurl's Electronic Bard:
> >https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad
> >
> >There's some discussion of fine tuning input, but I think more cases
> >where
> >they keep the prompt fixed and show several different outputs.
>
> --
> glen
>
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