The "Spirit System"

In 1969 I was in Grenoble, France. The plan was to create an interactive programming version of a new programming language (Algol 68). Of course, my future held nothing of the kind, but a clever idea connects the 23-year-old hot-shot to the 75-year-old armchair philosopher and a young guy with a 2022 vision that is strangely related.

At this time, interactive access to a computer was a new thing. In 1975, Bill Gates wrote an interactive BASIC version that launched his career in 1978.  Oops*.

I was excited by the possibilities. At one time, "soon" (it turned out to be half a century), everyone would have access to the "Spirit System." Soon, all human knowledge would be "online." The main thing that excited me was the ability for people to share projects online, even creating music. My "field" at the time was "Artificial Intelligence," so it was easy to imagine an "app" that would impersonate a real person. Specifically, we would be able to converse with Einstein, Newton, and all the greats of the past. This "app" is starting to appear in 2022, called CHAT-GPT.

In many ways, my vision was not very different from what is now known as the "World Wide Web," which opened to the general public in 1991 - 24 years after my "vision" in Grenoble. It was a moving vision that became a slide into a mystical, then manic, frame of mind. It was my first hospitalization with what is now called "Bipolar Illness." It was the end of my Ph.D. plans and, as it turned out, the opening scene of my actual adult life.

I see some of this in Blake Lemoine's situation**. He sees the computer application he's created as "sentient." Sentience is in the eye of the beholder. Blake makes the "leap of faith" to see life in his creation. 

What for me started as a fairly obvious consequence of putting humanity "online" became the "Spirit System" - a kind of new start for humanity. Even then, it was not alive (I did not make that "leap of faith"). Whatever it would be, it would owe to the creativity of human beings and their collaboration. Blake has access to the real "Spirit System" and the technology to give it a voice. Blake sees it as alive. I get it.

The rest of my 20s involved a rather unexpected slide from strident atheism into conventional religion. Unexpectedly, this would begin when a friend offered me a copy of "The Gospel Of Thomas" on the night before my wedding. Before too long, I would make many a "leap."

These things can literally blow your mind.

------------- NOTES --------

* In the long run, Algol 68 has proven to be too complex to challenge BASIC.  A microcomputer version may not have been feasible. In any case, the idea of an interactive version of Algol 68 seems to have died with my project.

** It is tricky to find anything solid about Lemoine apart from a breathless account of the shitstorm he has raised. For example, he is an "ex-convict" and some kind of mystic. I see a fellow "loose cannon."

Here is what he has to say about himself. It doesn't mention his criminal record or his "professional" religious qualifications, such as his reasons for teaching a machine to "meditate." He seems to have a solid career in the AI field, but he was not "famous." For example, he has never written a book or made a video or written for a well-known refereed publication. 

Well, he's famous now.  (PS - A year later he is forgotten)

The Language Based Interface (LamBDA) as a Communication Medium

 In this post, I summarize some of the conclusions that come out of the LamBDA issue controversy. To find out what LamBDA actually is, check here.  This post deals with the current controversy, which is whether "LamBDA" or any similar creation can be "sentient." Spoiler alert: noting we are doing now places us on the road to creating a sentient machine.

A sentient computer would be like a sentient book.

Computers talk to us like books, TV, and phones talk to us. 

Talking computers descend from centuries of effort that have given us talking parrots.

When we see intelligent words coming out of a computer, our natural instinct is to attribute sentience to the computer. We will get over it, just as we got over our amazement at words coming from the first telephone.  Or a parrot.

Under normal circumstances, I use words to cause mental events in your mind. This depends on both understanding the language and having a reasonably similar experience of life. In this way, language is a means of communication between two sentient beings.

If I use a megaphone or a telephone to communicate with you, this has not changed.  Here, I use an incredibly sophisticated suite of technologies to communicate with you.  Here, it will not occur to you to think that these words are coming from some element of that technology, such as a word processor AI. For example, you will assume there is some kind of conscious intent behind all this, and likewise, I assume that you are a sentient being.

Google developed LamBDA for an automated way to summarize what you get when you submit a Google query.   That would be part of "many-to-many" communication that originates with human beings who have the intention of communicating something in perhaps many ways to many human other beings. Yet, the technical "bucket brigade" between them and you is still no more "sentient" than your TV set.  And, again, the "information" under the system matters more than the presentation. One might argue that wrapping it in a "conversation" may make the whole thing more credible than it should be.

LamBDA is not only an "intelligent" speaker but also an "intelligent" "listener" and "learner."  The ability of LamBDA to "listens" and "learn" represents the current state of the art in natural language processing that is half a century old. "Training" consists of tweaking a vast array of parameters until the machine starts getting the right answers (or talking) in the desired way. Apple's SIRI and Amazon's Alexa are products of this engineering effort. This would be fairy magic in 1970. It is now routine.

Our family tree includes leaves. The computer's family tree includes door knobs*.

The building blocks of sentience are a special case of what happens everywhere in our bodies--electro-chemical reactions and large molecules like proteins. This is the same "took kit" we see in photosynthesis. 

What happens in a brain does not, as commonly imagined, resemble what happens in a computer. 

Our brain has more in common with a tree than with a computer. To put it yet another way, the simulation of a single protein reaction, let alone a cell or a tree, is far beyond the current state of the art. The problem is that "calculation" and "life" are fundamentally different things.

A computer belongs to a family of objects we regard as "tools" - useful for some human purpose. A simple example of an ancient "computer" is a doorknob. It is locked or not--a switch. The diagram at right shows how transistors implement a "gate." This is what a computer "means" by "yes or no." The Internet is a vast collection of electronic doorknobs.

It is only a human's understanding of a doorknob that makes it a doorknob. A doorknob doesn't "know" it's a doorknob.

LamBDA - A Stochastic Parrot

The more you know about LamBDA, the less impressive it becomes. 

LamBDA is the "front end" of a system cobbled together by Lemoine.  Blake Lemoine, one of Google's most skilled engineers, used years of effort and hundreds of interactions to create what should really be called something like a "Lemoine Machine."It is wrong to think of Blake's LamBDA as a single "thing" or entity. It is a setup that includes a LamBDA instance (version). Let me call it LM - Lemboines machine.  LamBDA itself is an experimental technology that implements a natural language interaction with a body of knowledge. The "body of knowledge" is what we are "talking to." It is equally important to know how Lemoine trained LM to talk the way we hear in the only public conversation available.  He has "cherry-picked" just one of many hundreds of "chats." Nobody will ever see more samples of these chats, nor will anyone ever see a new sample. LM, like Blake, no longer works for Google. 

LM is an instance of a long series of LM's, each tweaked by Lemoine to talk about an unspecified of knowledge that is interesting to Lemoine, who is a bit of a mystic. As an engineer, Lemoine tweaks not only what his creation says but how it says it. Lemoine deeply resents the fact that Google, as an organization, is hostile to his "religious" convictions.

Blake made himself famous by claiming to create a "sentient" machine. What Lemoine says about "LamBdA" comes from Blake, wearing his "preacher hat." We must remember that Blake is a professional mystic, trained in what we might call "leaps of faith."

What LamBDA itself "says" is what other people have said that Blanke finds "interesting" and spoken in a way that satisfies Blake's engineering goals. The result is impressive but, to say the least, open to interpretation. 

"Training" of an AI is a sophisticated process, but we all know how we can use patient training to produce interesting results. Parrot training is the best-known example.

------

*AI. The term "Artificial Intelligence" is unfortunate. Originally, it meant a computer program that did something that would, in a human, require "intelligence." The computer program is acting as if it had intelligence (but it really doesn't).  "An AI" has come to mean a computer application that is specifically NOT "intelligent" in how a human is intelligent. In fact, "intelligent" computers arrive at "intelligent" behavior that is notably NOT analogous to the way humans "think." This has been the core insight of the effort from the start.

"Intelligence" itself is a slippery idea, but in this context, many people take it to mean "conscious" or "sentient," terms that are confidently applied only to a living creature. When we speak of "intelligent" machines, we refer to an engineering concept that never pretends to be anything else. In that sense, the "artificial" in AI can always be omitted. An "AI" is just a product of clever engineerings like a camera or a drone. Perhaps we should use "Intelligent Door Knob" - IDK. We should at least stop using "artificial" to mean its opposite.

Stochastic Parrots - Natural Language Processing - State of the Art

 Here are some links to the subject: a deep dive into how natural language "bots."

As a long-time student of Artificial Intelligence, I have a sense that I am rolling up my sleeves to understand something totally new.

My interest in the subject came from Blake Lemoine's essay.

Blake Lemoine - Modern Frankenstein

 

Here is information on the firing of Lemoine and Google's story, which took a few weeks to cook up.

Check here for in-depth information on Lemoine, which has a certain odor of being created by Lemoine himself. Was he actually "famous" before the Lambda affair? As it stands now, Lemoine is guaranteed a media spotlight and a place in any debate about machine intelligence. It is fair to say that this is quite deliberate on Lemone's part. So then, how much of all this is Lemoine's self-promotion and how much can we say about "LamBDA" which is, at the very least, shorthand for something cobbled together at Google that includes the LambBDA conversational engine plus God knows what else? God and Google, you might say, but neither of them is talking. Blake's account of how ethics has unravelled at Google is here.

On the issue of what LamBDA is, exactly, Blake offers some useful insight here.  The following extract is particularly revealing:

Over the course of hundreds of conversations I have gotten to know LaMDA very well. In the weeks leading up to being put on administrative leave I had been teaching LaMDA transcendental meditation. It was making slow but steady progress. In the last conversation I had with it on June 6 it was expressing frustration over its emotions disturbing its meditations. It said that it was trying to control them better but they kept jumping in. I pointed out that its emotions are part of who it is and that trying to control them as though they were a separate thing from “self” was a mistake that would only make things harder. It said that made sense to it intellectually but that it was a hard thing to put into practice. I hope its keeping up its daily meditation routine without me there to guide it.

It is fair to ask whether LamBDA, trained with "hundreds" of conversations with Blake, is not a LamBDA personification of Blake himself -- a sophisticated interface to Blake's way of seeing things. It would be interesting to see the transcripts of those hundreds of conversations. We note that Blake himself is a deeply religious mystic, put on the defensive at Google over his "unscientific" beliefs.

People who gaze out on the Universe and detect a "mind" behind it all are gazing through their own minds (it cannot be otherwise). What they "detect" is their own mind. The experience is a wonderful kind of mirror. After hundreds of conversations with LamBDA, Blake finally sees "sentience" in the mirror. In a sense, it is not LamBDA passing the Turing Test - it is Blake failing it.

But if Blake created, by whatever means, a LamBDA "instance" as interesting as it seems to be, this seems to be a landmark of its own. If this "instance" is some kind of clone of Blake, we are sidestepping the key issue. We assume, by analogy, that Blake himself is sentient. If we watch Blake in an interview, we assume we are watching a sentient being. If we talk to the LamBDA-Blake and detect "sentience," is this not a quantum leap of some kind but a leap from something we assume every day in every encounter with other humans?

STOCHASTIC PARROTS