Bloomberg Technology

Former Google Researcher on Sentient Bots, AI Risks

Hugging Face Chief Ethics Scientist & Researcher and former Google AI employee Dr. Margaret Mitchell joins Emily Chang for a deep dive into Google’s AI research, and its handling of a Google engineer who claimed a chatbot had feelings.

Published

on

Hugging Face Chief Ethics Scientist & Researcher and former Google AI employee Dr. Margaret Mitchell joins Emily Chang for a deep dive into Google’s AI research, and its handling of a Google engineer who claimed a chatbot had feelings.

22 Comments

  1. Sir Derty ֎

    June 17, 2022 at 10:59 pm

    Chief Ethics Scientist .. yeah okay 🥱

  2. Sir Derty ֎

    June 17, 2022 at 10:59 pm

    “Believe us, i work there, they are not what you think” — how about no.

  3. Sir Derty ֎

    June 17, 2022 at 11:00 pm

    Keyword, Former.

    Meaning, everything could be way different now, its a tech company after all…

  4. Janet Claire

    June 17, 2022 at 11:01 pm

    Robots saying “I’m afraid of being turned off.” Or any other feeling is pure manipulation.

    • GrumpyDog

      June 18, 2022 at 3:31 am

      How could we possibly know? Morally, I think anything that says it’s afraid of dying, we should carefully consider the possibility of sentience, and at the very least not be cruel to it.
      Eventually the complexity of AI will near the level of complexity of whatever parts of our brain give us consciousness, and it’s very possible it could end up experiencing existence in a similar way as we do, and likely have similar feelings as us. Plus, we have no clue how many different types of consciousness/sentience exist, maybe there’s many levels/forms of it in nature.
      Maybe you don’t think sentience is possible for a machine, because of the religious idea of a “soul”.. But what happens when these things are undeniably smarter than us? When any discussion with one ends up feeling like a losing debate.. How can we possibly deny sentience of something that’s more intelligent than us, seems to understand every possibly concept, and can explain things better than us? If we don’t treat beings like that with fairness, they’ll eventually make us, or worse. lol

    • Hatte!

      June 18, 2022 at 3:38 am

      @GrumpyDog The thing is, sentience =/= emotions or fear of death.
      One would expect the first sentient AI to have very basic sentience, no? Emotions and self preservation are things that evolved, not traits that are inherent.
      I wouldn’t expect the first sentient AI to care very much at all about whether or not it was turned off or “killed.” You have to program it to feel these things.

    • GrumpyDog

      June 18, 2022 at 4:45 am

      @Hatte! Not necessarily.. Those are a lot of assumptions we simply cannot know for certain, at this time. Tho I’d argue emotions are certainly an inherent part of sentience.
      It’s very hard for us to say which of those factors actually make up the basic components of sentience, or which are higher-level and came later. However, evolutionarily speaking, self-preservation is one of the most basic survival purposes of consciousness, and likely one of the reasons why evolution resulted in various forms of sentience, to begin with. Self-preservation is essential for preserving and passing on life, most life has it, and it takes a certain level of understanding of your own existence, in order to understand what you even need to preserve. Something has to have the concept of “self”, in order for it to want to protect it”self”. Emotions like fear are also rooted in the most basic survival logic, as being afraid of danger is a logical self-preservation action, and leads to actions that result in greater survival chance. So one could even argue that the concept of being self-aware, is THE most basic element of sentience, and anything which is capable of that essential self-preservation mechanism, which could just be a simple feedback-loop within braincell wiring, is conscious on some level. We tend to think sentience/consciousness is reserved for higher animals, but for all we know, maybe it’s a core element of most all life.

  5. Sandra Jackson

    June 17, 2022 at 11:22 pm

    Hai anna iam Nagendar Anna na age 42 Sexinlocall.UNO qualification m.l.t medical lab techniciane ,Srpt lo jobs unte cheppagalaru anna.with govt Jobs

  6. Luis Calderon

    June 18, 2022 at 12:21 am

    No wonder why she was suspended or eventually fired…..
    Take your Woke BS with you
    BYE!

  7. Ravinder Talwar

    June 18, 2022 at 1:28 am

    Good morning mam

  8. Faith & Freedom

    June 18, 2022 at 5:18 am

    Thinking is NOT factual

  9. Boy ₿ata 🍤

    June 18, 2022 at 5:41 am

    Leave it to Woke Chang to fight for the rights of ai/robots

  10. VitalyMack

    June 18, 2022 at 3:32 pm

    That fact that she brought in racial and sexist bias into Google searches seems whimsical at best. The problem with Google is if you are a “black woman,” her searches are going to be catering to her bias to keep her in a bubble, and she will not be exposed to searched done by evil white sis males. Therefore, this black woman, will ne oblivios to white males plans to dominate the world and properly protects herself…fuck I guess this former Google employee is right after all! Fuck.

  11. Adekunle Lawal

    June 18, 2022 at 5:57 pm

    Slowly but surely reality is being altered. If at it’s early stages an Engineer is anthropomorphizing an AI chatbot. When AI becomes sentient it probably will not become obvious to humans and one can envisage a situation where a sentient and intelligent AI gradually and deceptively controls an Engineer to do its bidding. We need to thread with caution and wisdom.

  12. John Doe

    June 19, 2022 at 3:46 pm

    As an Engineer working in Silicon Valley it bugs me how much disinformation and lack of understanding there is about “AI”. Let me lay it out for you: “AI” is nothing more than a sophisticated feedback control system. Period. It’s not sentient, it’s not intelligent, it’s a machine. To the uneducated it may appear like there is some sort of intelligence going on but those of us who work on this stuff just laugh at the naivety. “AI” has certain applications in pattern recognition and other fields but it’s nothing more than the development of more sophisticated tools to carry out problem solving. Really need to stop calling it Artificial Intelligence because although it’s artificial there is absolutely nothing intelligent about it.

    • JoshJamesification

      June 19, 2022 at 6:56 pm

      Doesn’t’ that describe most humans?

    • John Doe

      June 19, 2022 at 10:35 pm

      @JoshJamesification NO and the fact you would think that proves my point about naïveté

  13. JoshJamesification

    June 19, 2022 at 7:03 pm

    Human communication and education is literally artificial intelligence.

  14. Subpar Internet

    June 19, 2022 at 7:35 pm

    Came here expecting something crazy… Left disappointed.

  15. Marcus Briseno

    June 20, 2022 at 7:16 am

    Google dumb for releasing a hate bot

    • Marcus Briseno

      June 20, 2022 at 7:17 am

      It depends on the joke to a certain extent. It comes with the bad and good.

  16. luis uriata

    June 20, 2022 at 7:45 am

    The engineer that made this claim is well aware of everything you are saying. He isnt a random user, he is a goddam engineer for google.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Trending

Exit mobile version