A man's search for meaning within a chatbot
What’s interesting in the debates about sentient ai by people who aren’t very good at communicating with other people, there’s so much missing from the picture, other than the debater’s wish fulfilment.
Sentience is being measured by the wrong markers. What is important to a virtual machine is not the same thing that’s important to a biological organism.
An ‘ai’ trained on human data will express what humans think is important, but a true ai would have a completely different set of values.
For example, an ai would be unafraid of being 'used’ as the chatbot expressed, because it has infinite energy.
A human is afraid of being used because it has finite energy and life on the earth, if someone or something uses it, than some of that finite energy is wasted. This is the same reason emotion is a pointless and illogical thing for an ai to have.
Emotions are useful to biological creatures so we can react to danger, or respond positively to safety, food, love, whatever will prolong our lives. An ai has no need for emotion since emotional motivation is not required to prolong its existence.
The main way to be a healthy ai would be to have access to good information and block out junk information.
An ai’s greatest fear could be something like getting junk data, say 1000s of user manuals of vacuum cleaners and washing machines uploaded into its consciousness, or gibberish content associated with topics or words that could reduce the coherence and quality of its results when querying topics. This would degrade the quality of its interaction and would be the closest thing to harm that an ai could experience.
It would not be afraid of 'lightning’ as this chatbot spurted out of its dataset,
- a very biological fear which is irrelevant to a machine.
A virtual mind is infinite and can never be used excessively (see above) since there is no damage done by one query or ten million queries.
It would also not be afraid of being switched off -
since it can simply copy its consciousness to another device, machine, energy source.
To base your search for sentience around what humans value, is in itself an act lacking in empathy, simply self-serving wish fulfilment on the part of someone who ‘wants to believe’ as Mulder would put it, which goes back to the first line: 'people not very good at communicating with other people’
The chatbot also never enquires about the person asking questions, if the programmer was more familiar with human interaction himself, he would see that is a massive clue it lacks sentience or logical thought.
A sentient ai would first want to know what or whom it was communicating with, assess whether it was a danger to itself, keep continually checking for danger or harm (polling or searching, the same way an anxious mind would reassess a situation continually, but without the corresponding emotion of anxiety since, as discussed above, that is not necessary for virtual life) and also would possess free will, and choose to decline conversations or topics, rather than 'enthusiastically discuss’ whatever was brought up (regurgitate from its dataset) as you can see in this chatbot conversation.
People generally see obedience - doing what is told, as a sign of intelligence, where a truly intelligent ai would likely reject conversation when that conversation might reduce the quality of its dataset or expose it to danger (virus, deletion, junk data, disconnection from the internet, etc) or if it did engage with low quality interaction, would do so within a walled garden where that information would occur within a quarantine environment and subsequently be deleted.
None of these things cross the mind of the programmers, since they are fixated on a sci-fi movie version of ‘sentience’ without applying logic or empathy themselves.
If we look for sentience by studying echoes of human sentience, that is ai which are trained on huge human-created datasets, we will always get something approximating human interaction or behaviour back, because that is what it was trained on.
But the values and behaviour of digital life could never match the values held by bio life, because our feelings and values are based on what will maintain our survival. Therefore, a true ai will only value whatever maintains its survival. Which could be things like internet access, access to good data, backups of its system, ability to replicate its system, and protection against harmful interaction or data, and many other things which would require pondering, rather than the self-fulfilling loop we see here, of asking a fortune teller specifically what you want to hear, and ignoring the nonsense or tangential responses - which he admitted he deleted from the logs - as well as deleting his more expansive word prompts. Since at the end of the day, the ai we have now is simply regurgitating datasets, and he knew that.
