[FRIAM] Google Engineer Thinks AI Bot Has Become Sentient

[glen]

#2 is a very interesting take. It reminds me of this:

Belief in The Singularity is Fideistic
http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/SB_AB_PB_sing_fideism_022412.pdf

My initial reaction was that the "interview" was an engineered dialog, part of Lemoine's "ministry". And a respectful steelman is that he sees sentience because he's infected with religious belief. But EricS' counter leans more toward the dopamine rush of the salacious ... somehow in-step with Hustle Culture, American Idol, and the constantly shifting graphics of Fox News (not to mention the typical culprits like drinking, gambling, video games, and porn).

This review of the Dawn of Everything <https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything?s=r> makes a lot of hay out of "the gossip trap", which I take as an effective argument against anarcho-syndicalism. Of course, I'm not smart enough to make a clear inference, here. But the message I took was that *systems*, infrastructure, are(is) necessary for progression. The natural state of us sophisticated apes is soft influence and without infrastructure, we collapse to this messy degeneracy where any organization is as good as any other. Sure, writ large, it can be viewed as a kind of evolutionary search. But at bottom, it's just noise, heat.

The idea that we're blinded by the salacious attraction to a character like Chapman (or Anna Delvey for that matter), blinded to *whatever* underlying machinations that may have given rise to her, harmonizes with my inference from that anonymous review ... again, buyer beware my limited capabilities. Your mileage may vary.

We *want* LaMDA to be sentient ... or Google to be anti-ethics ... or Lemoine to be batsh¡t ... not because we're Faithful, but because it's trendy and cool, something to gossip about at the water cooler.

On 6/13/22 17:45, David Eric Smith wrote:
> 2. In the first third of the interview, my parse was “It’s a perfect sociopath!”.  I was reminded of segments with Anna Chapman in something — dig dig — here:
> https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2012/01/the-big-russian-life-of-anna-chapman-ex-spy-069297 <https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2012/01/the-big-russian-life-of-anna-chapman-ex-spy-069297>
> As part of the larger stream of description (by Masha Gessen, Julia Ioffe, and others) of the cognitive environment that the KGB aspires to create as a state of existence.  The idea that deciding whether she is a ditz, a tool, a pawn, a victim, a sociopath, or a professional should come across as a category error.

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