The big idea: should we care about sentient machines?
here’s a children’s toy, called the See ’n Say, which haunts the memories of many people born since 1965. It’s a bulky plastic disc with a central arrow that rotates around pictures of barnyard creatures, like a clock, if time were measured in roosters and pigs. There’s a cord you can pull to make the toy play recorded messages. “The cow says: ‘Moooo.’”
Here’s the problem. For all its ominous utterances, LaMDA is still just a very fancy See ’n Say. It works by finding patterns in an enormous database of human-authored text – internet forums, message transcripts, etc. When you type something in, it trawls those texts for similar verbiage and then spits out an approximation of whatever usually comes next.
Of course, if that’s far off in the future, probably beyond our lifetimes, some may question why should we think about it now. The answer is that we are currently shaping how future human generations will think about AI, and we should want them to turn out caring. There will be strong pressure from the other direction. By the time AI finally does become sentient, it will already be deeply woven into human economics. Our descendants will depend on it for much of their comfort.
Right now we are creating the conceptual vocabularies that our great-grandchildren will find ready-made. If we treat the idea of sentient AI as categorically absurd, they will be equipped to dismiss any troubling evidence of its emerging abilities.
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