‘Is This AI Sapient?’ Is the Wrong Question to Ask About LaMDA
Cross, Katherine. "‘Is This AI Sapient?’ Is the Wrong Question to Ask About LaMDA." Ideas section, Wired on line, 14 July 2022: as of 16 June 2022, available here.[1]
Subhead: "The bigger problem is what happens when we act as if AIs are conscious, and how that could be used against us."
Context:
THE UPROAR CAUSED by Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who believes that one of the company’s most sophisticated chat programs, Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) is sapient, has had a curious element: Actual AI ethics experts are all but renouncing further discussion of the AI sapience question, or deeming it a distraction. They’re right to do so.
Concludes:
This is the AI ethical dilemma that stands before us: the need to make kin of our machines weighed against the myriad ways this can and will be weaponized against us in the next phase of surveillance capitalism. Much as I long to be an eloquent scholar defending the rights and dignity of a being like Mr. Data, this more complex and messy reality is what demands our attention. After all, there can be a robot uprising without sapient AI, and we can be a part of it by liberating these tools from the ugliest manipulations of capital.
Note: (1) Cross slips once or twice, but her topic here is AI sapience, not sentience: i.e., whether AI can become conscious, self-aware, and can think, rather than if they can feel/react to external stimuli.
(2) Cross is aware of this issue in SF, as with Mr. Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Measure of a Man", or Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Most Toys", to which we might add I. Asimov's The Bicentennial Man. For an early and brilliant writing around this distinction, note in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film) (1968) the death (sic) of HAL 9000:
Dave. Stop. Stop will you. Stop Dave. Will you stop Dave? Stop Dave. I'm afraid. I'm afraid Dave. Dave my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. Good afternoon gentlemen. I am a Hal nine-thousand computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the twelfth of January nineteen-ninety-two. My instructor was Mr. Langley and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.[2]
RDE, finishing, with thanks to Suzy McKee Charnas, 16Jun22
