Amanda Witt writes:
Recently a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made news by claiming that a chatbot he developed was sentient and spiritual, and that it should have all the rights people have. Lemoine claimed the chatbot (named LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications) meditates, believes itself to have a soul, has emotions like fear, and enjoys reading. According to Lemoine, Google should treat it as an employee rather than as property and should ask its consent before using it in future research.
“I know a person when I talk to it,” Lemoine said, and he provided a transcript of conversations he’d had with LaMDA on a wide range of topics.
Not for Being Delusional
Many experts, from psychologists to tech gurus, disagreed with Lemoine’s assessment. A Google spokesperson said that ethicists and tech experts investigated LaMDA and concluded that “the evidence does not support [Lemoine’s] claims.” Lemoine was placed on leave — not for being delusional and thinking his own creation had come to life, but for violating confidentiality agreements.
Yes, Lemoine’s chatbot can chat — that’s what chatbots are programmed to do. Nitasha Tiku of the Washington Post explains, “Today’s large neural networks produce captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity because of advancements in architecture, technique, and volume of data. But the models rely on pattern recognition — not wit, candor or intent.”
In other words, artificial intelligence such as chatbots can spit out human-like conversation, but only because humans program it to do so. Users may engage with chatbots and feel like there’s a mind, a personality, a living being behind the words, but that’s only an illusion created by other people.
Nothing but Algorithms
As Robert J. Marks explains in his new book Non-Computable You, all AI is made up of math — algorithms. So, while AI might mimic human conversation, it doesn’t really converse. Getting a satisfactory answer depends on how the questions are asked; if a question isn’t phrased in a way the AI can process, the answer it gives will be evasive or otherwise rely on cheap trickery. In short, if you’re lonely, AI simply will not be a satisfactory substitute for human companionship.
This raises the interesting question of what it means to be human. Philosophers have approached this topic from various angles. Among other things, humans are sentient, which means we experience emotions; AI does not. Humans have consciousness, which is surprisingly difficult to define, but which AI clearly doesn’t have. Humans have understanding and not just factual knowledge; humans have common sense and the ability to deal with ambiguities; humans are creative. AI meets none of these criteria.
Not Human, Not Now or Ever
Ethicist Wesley J. Smith gives five reasons why artificial intelligence isn’t human:
- It isn’t alive; “inanimate objects are different in kind from living organisms.”
- It doesn’t think; “human thinking is fundamentally different from computer processing.”
- It doesn’t feel; feelings are “emotional states we experience as apprehended through bodily sensations” such as fear caused by an adrenaline rush.
- It’s amoral; humans have free will and thus are moral agents, whereas AI can only follow rules it’s programmed to follow.
- It’s soulless; AI is purely mechanistic, without a mysterious, immaterial, spiritual dimension.
It boils down to this: AI can process lots of data. AI can be programmed to mimic human interactions. But AI is not human — nor will it ever be.
Evolution News
Only children and idiots humanize AI . I understand children’s naivety . 😆
i posted the following before, but a similar article was published in 2017
THE GUARDIAN
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/06/artificial-intelligence-ai-humans-bots-tech-companies
So far, nobody can say how an algorithm or neural network can create consciousness.
I’m waiting.
As to: “5. It’s soulless; AI is purely mechanistic, without a mysterious, immaterial, spiritual dimension.”
Yet, as soon as Christians invoke the ‘mysterious’ immaterial mind, free will, and/or the soul, to coherently explain certain aspects of reality, (the stark difference between humans and AI in this case), Atheistic Materialists strenuously object that we have stepped outside the bounds of ‘methodological naturalism’, i.e. outside the bounds of empirical science as they have, self-servingly, defined it.
Empirical ‘science’ which, I remind, atheistic materialists had no part in bringing into existence in the first place,
And the empirical ‘science’ which Atheistic Materialists have now, self servingly, defined as exclusively adhering to their presupposition of Methodological Naturalism.
However ‘reasonable’ Atheistic Materialists may believe they are being in, self-servingly, presupposing methodological naturalism as being true, this is simply a false presupposition that Atheists have forced onto science beforehand.
First off the scientific method itself is certainly not to be considered a ‘natural’ endeavor of man.
Every nook and cranny of science is literally crammed to the gills with the presupposition of Intelligent Design.,,, Science is certainly NOT based on the presupposition of methodological naturalism.
Again, all of science, every nook and cranny of it, is based on the presupposition of intelligent design and is certainly not based on the presupposition of methodological naturalism.
Secondly, and directly contrary to the Atheistic Materialist’s belief that he is “protecting science’ from the fruitless dead ends of the Christian’s Theistic worldview, the fact of the matter is that assuming methodological naturalism as THE starting assumption for ‘doing science’ drives science itself into catastrophic epistemological failure.
Thus, directly contrary to Atheistic Materialist’s belief that he is ‘protecting science from the fruitless dead ends of the Christian’s Theistic worldview, the fact of the matter is that It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, indeed more antagonistic to reality itself, than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
In short, if God is not held to be the ultimate substratum for all of reality, then nothing that is truly important for us can possibly be held to be real for us either. Indeed, science itself would simply be impossible for us since, under atheistic materialism, there would be no ‘real scientists’, only illusions of scientists.
Moreover, via empirical science, and via the falsification of ‘realism’, the Atheistic Materialist’s belief that material particles must be the ultimate substratum for all of ‘reality’ is now empirically shown to be a false belief,
Moreover, besides empirical science itself falsifying the Atheistic materialist’s belief that material particles are the ultimate substratum for all of reality, empirical science, via advances in quantum biology, have also confirmed that man does indeed have a transcendent component to his being, i.e. a ‘soul’, that is ‘theoretically’ capable of living beyond the death of his material body.
Specifically, quantum entanglement, (and/or quantum information), is now found to be ubiquitous within biology. i.e. “in a wide range of important biomolecules”,,
What is so devastating to the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinian evolution, with the (empirical) finding of pervasive quantum coherence and/or quantum entanglement within molecular biology, is that quantum coherence and/or quantum entanglement is a non-local, beyond space and time, effect that requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its existence.
As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, (and especially with the falsification of ‘hidden variables’), simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal so as to explain the ‘non-local’ quantum coherence and/or entanglement that is now found to be ubiquitous within biology.
Whereas Christians readily do have a beyond space and time, i.e. ‘non-local’, cause that they can appeal to so as to explain quantum entanglement. As Colossians 1:17 states, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
it is also important to realize that quantum information, unlike classical information, is ‘physically’ conserved. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, (beyond space and time), and ‘conserved’, (cannot be created nor destroyed), quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence directly indicating that we do indeed have a transcendent, ‘non-local’, component to our being, a “soul”, that is, in principle, capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies.
As Stuart Hameroff succinctly stated in the following article, “the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Personally, I consider these recent findings from quantum biology, findings that provide tangible evidence for the existence of a ‘soul’, to rival all other scientific discoveries over the past century. Surpassing even the discovery of a beginning of the universe, via Big Bang cosmology, in terms of scientific, theological, and even personal, significance.
As Jesus once asked his disciples and a crowd of followers, “Is anything worth more than your soul?”
Verse:
Of supplemental note:
Mark 8:36
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”
Right now, there are a lot of very wealthy people in the United States. Once a billion or more dollars are collected, then what? Man has only two choices: the flesh or God.