Is LaMDA alive? Part I

Published Jul 22, 2022, 3:00 PM

Recently, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made international news with his claims that the company's creation LaMDA - Launguage Model for Dialogue Applications - has become sentient. While Google does describe LaMDA as "breakthrough conversation technology," the company does not agree with Lemoine -- to say the least. In part one of this two-part series, Ben and Matt explore the nature of sentience, along with the statements of not just Google and Lemoine -- but LaMDA itself.

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of My Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Our colleague Nol is not here today but will return shortly. They call me Bed. Now. We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis code named Doc Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. You'll notice I had a slight imperfection with our beginning here, a little bit of a stumble, and a lot of people would argue, that's something that lets you know you are listening to human beings or humanoid creatures rather than uh, computer generated semblances of intelligence. And Matt, this is the episode that yeah, Ben, as you were saying that over over the riverside. We we use this um, we use this. It's kind of like a zoom that you'd be used to. We connect to each other virtually and we have these conversations and we record them. Ben. Your voice, as you said, you know you're talking to a human glitched out in this digitized really strange robot voice. I'm not kidding. Well, we'll see if it makes it into the edit. We are massively excited about this, and maybe that's a good sign for today's episode, which is gonna go pretty in depth in a controversy that Uh, Matt, you and I have been very interested in for some time. I would say this is the newest iteration of a conversation we've been interested in for most of our friendship. Honestly, Uh, like all known living things, human beings, regardless of their beliefs, their socioeconomic status, what have you, do, have one hardwired primal impulse to propagate, to reproduce, to create things like themselves. Doesn't mean everybody will, or on an individual level, even wants to do that, but it does mean that overall humanity and all other organisms known to science want to create as many new iterations of themselves as possible, to expand to and pass the limits of what their environment will sustain. But again, what's interesting about humans, love them or hate them, is they differ in one startling respect from all other known forms of life. They're the first species consciously trying to create, not just more of themselves, but entirely new intelligent life forms that may one day surpass them. I mean, it's Promethean, it's the fire of knowledge. It's the bleeding edge of Siah. If you ask one Google employee, it's already happened. This is the story of Lambda and a man who thinks it has become a living thing. So long time listeners, you know the drill. Here are the facts. Now, what what is it? What is lambda? Lambda? Yeah? It is not a little puppet character that sings sometimes that I think about. And every time I think about a lamb, I don't know why. What's the name of that lamb? Do you know what I'm talking about? Lamb shop? Thank you? That's every time I look at the word lambda, that's what I think about. Um. But it is actually shorthand. It's a phrase language model for dialogue applications. Sounds nice language model for dialogue applications. It's interesting because it's a plural term it and it's describing several things. It's specifically several types of neural language models that this thing is like or their conversational kind of reminds me of a couple other of these things we've talked about in the past, mentioned them usually in our Strange news or listener mail episodes, because it's like a one off kind of mention where it's a chat bought that people call them chat bots because there was a thing called chat bought that kind of at least came to my knowledge for the first time one of these language models. But this thing is way more sophisticated. It is. Yeah, Lambda itself is not a chat bot. It is like a chat bought factory kind of chatbots. It's a system for generating very intelligent instances of chat bots. And and you know, a lot of us, like you said, think of things like clever bot, which we'll get to it a second. But chat bought technology at its heart choosing very loaded words here is older than you might think. You know, the early East ones date back to the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, which is probably surprising to anybody not in the field. These are programs like Eliza and Perry Perry as in the fencing move You you might be familiar with this basic idea. I think most people are nowadays. These programs use pretty sophisticated neural networks nowadays to ingest massive quantities of text. Think of the scene in short Circuit where Johnny five reads an entire library. You know, they ingest text that way, and then based on that they model out responses to human beings or questioners or conversation partners in a text chat format. And and often that input is via questions and answers. Right, So differentiating between a query and a response, yeah, absolutely, And pro tip depending on which chatbot you interact with, um, you may find that they are somewhat defensive when you bring up the question of so called artificial intelligence, a statement with its own problems. But this neural network stuff is amazing, and it follows a trend that we see in in so much technology there at the precipice of innovation. It's essentially it's a series of algorithms that endeavor to recognize underlying relationships between sets of data through a process that mimics, in a in a crude way, uh, the way the human brain operates. So in this sense, neural networks refer to systems of neurons. And like you said that, any anyone listening today, any of our fellow conspiracy realists, can converse with a number of chatbots, right, Now, for instance, all you have to do is go to something like clever bot dot com and just start typing. This program will have a kind of interaction with you. Some would call it a conversation, right, but you're quickly going to I think even if you didn't know you were talking to a generative program, you would quickly understand you weren't talking to a human mind. Would you agree with that? Am I being too hard on on our clever boy right there? Well? I agree with you according to the last time I interacted with clever bot. It's been a while, but yes, you can tell that the answers it's like something somebody else said, or pieces of something somebody else said, but it isn't quite put together in the same way in a thoughtful response that I imagine a human would. But again, you never know, because these things One of the main things you need to know about these systems. Generally, they can put out what you put in and really nothing else. Um as in, they can take the pieces of what's put in and rearrange them a little bit, but it's always going to be something that has been entered into the system. If they're functioning the way theoretically they should Yeah, well said. Lambda is a sophisticated version of this concept. Again, by no means the first of its kind even for Google. In Google showed off another AI chatbot called Mina, which is a fast daged story of its own. Uh. Lambda was announced at the Google Io keynote on May. The Google Io it's this huge conference Media of the minds, you know, it's this is where they revealed a lot of facts about Lambda. Lamb is powered by AI. It's built on something called the Transformer neural network architecture that was developed by Google Research a few years earlier in and I love what you're pointing out about the idea of UM some of these kinds of endeavors being able to base their responses only on what they have received or encountered. So Lambda is trained on human dialogue and stories and the ultimate goal is that it would be able to engage in a kind of holy grail in this field open ended conversation. And when we say open ended conversation, it's kind of like, UM. You know, you're hanging with your friends, right and you can theoretically say anything you want and they will generate in their own brains some sort of response that factors in the entire context of your relationship to each other, the context of your current, past and future environment. And you know, sometimes that conversation may result in a response where they say, dude, what the hell are you talking about? But they their brain has not even with maybe there um, not even with their conscious work on it. Their brain has already calculated and factored in so many other things. And that's that's what chatbots can hopefully one day, do you know, imagine imagine something like this, U. I imagine one day you go to Google or Duck Duck Go or your search browser of choice, and you start searching for something, and instead of just returning what you search for, the search engine returns with a question and says, you know, why do you want to know about that? Or for a law enforce and an agency might be something along blinds of I've alerted the authorities that you are attempting to build a pipe bomb, just a little distribient. The way I think about open ended conversations is actually how Google showed off this lambda when they first announced it. I guess they made a short promotional video of some sort that that you can watch right now if you search for it. And it shows dialogue trees. So like the moment there's input into Lambda system you as the user. Right, it opens almost an infinite number of possibilities that the next topic or the next answer question could be. Lamba goes through like all the possibilities, answers with one of those, and then depending on your input back to it, it does it again. So it really can just like take you anywhere at any time. And the whole point is like those conversations that that Ben was describing there, if you're talking to your friend, you're probably going to if you go to a new topic of conversation, it's likely that it is in some way partially related to the previous part of the conversation. Not always, but likely, right, and at Lamba can kind of take you down those pathways that are they're a little more narrow than you may even expect or think. Um and it that's what makes it feel human to me when I'm we're gonna get into it, but when reading some of these conversations that have been had with Lambda, and we'll pause here for a word from our sponsor, and we've returned, you know, and just a side note here, I don't know if anybody else remembers this, But shout out to any of our fellow listeners who remember the days of earlier Google, when I thought Google at strange times would sound extraordinarily human, you know, a very passive, aggressive, kind of snarky human when you would search for something and then it would correct you by saying, did you mean sodium citrate, which is, by the way, the thing that makes American process cheese MELTI you know, I love that feature because I don't know proper nouns, I don't know actors names, I don't know movies and how to spell them. Often, so I'm constantly typing just weird stuff into Google, and it's like, oh, we know what you're talking about. It was this thing that everybody else searched for, and yeah, and that's that's an amazing gift to humanity, because, uh, these search engines are some of the first things that can finally answer the questions that bedeviled record store employees and folks at Blockbuster for decades. You know, we're we function sometimes as customers coming into the big Google store or the big Internet store and saying, I think in the nineteen eighties there was a thing where this lady was an alien and would suck brains out of noses Harry Belfonte or whatever you know. And somehow from that though, Uh, these very clever pro grams will sift through the great quagmire and the hay stack of online knowledge and then come back with an answer that may or may not be correct. It feels increasingly like you're winning a prize of some sort when Google hits you with the uh, it looks like there aren't any good matches for your search, you know what I mean. That's going to become increasingly rare. But does that mean that the search engine, the programs associated with it, Does that mean they're alive? A lot of people will say absolutely not. Writing for The Economist, Google vice president Blaze Agara e Archis explains that a lot of his work in the past with Google focused on something be familiar to all of us, what he calls narrow AI functions. Facial recognition, you know, like the way you can the creepy way you can look at some phones and they'll unlock or they'll sign you into something on an you know, an app, um, and then what else stuff like um oh, speech recognition. Uh, it's close to home for us. Oh yeah, or maybe even just the ability for Google. Right now, if you go to web page that's in Portuguese or some other language and you're an English speaker, Google just gives you the option just to translate the entire day thing into into English or whatever language you speak or you know read. Uh. That's that's intense to me, that there's a system that can just translate anything at all times. You don't need guide stones for that. Oh oh, I don't think it's too soon. Along live Uh, you can't stop the signal, right. So this is interesting because this guy is very well placed executive at Google, and he wrote in the Economists internationally distributed periodical of Note that Lambda is something more than narrow i AI. To him, it's something new and different, and he's had conversations with Lambda. Many Google employees have. That's very important to this story. I get a Yarkas felt that more and more often he was talking to something intelligent. But he's quick to point out these models aren't aren't quite Asimov robot minds from science fiction. He says, LAMB is not really a reliable conversationalist, as spelling errors, as confusion about stuff and He also does a fantastic job explaining what we were talking about with neural networks. He basically says, yeah, you know, they're modeled on, uh, the idea of organic brains, but they're they're not equal. We actually we pulled a quote because he has a great comparison here at the end. Yes, he says. Neural language models aren't long programs. You could scroll through the code in a few seconds. They consist mainly of instructions to add and multiply enormous tables of numbers together. These numbers, in turn, consist of painstaking ly learned parameters or weights roughly analogous to the strengths of synapses between neurons in the brain, and activations roughly analogous to the dynamic activity levels of those neurons. Real brains are vastly more complex than these highly simplified model neurons, but perhaps in the same way a bird's wing is vastly more complex than the wing of the right brothers first plane. I agree with this. I I would have to say kind of push back against the Google vps saying, you know they're sing they're spelling errors in here, and there's some confusion because you know, humans don't ever make spelling errors or you know, show confusion when they're having a conversation, or get off track or misspeak when they're having a conversation. Right, I'm saying that maybe that's not the parameter that means this thing isn't intelligent. Maybe that's part of the intelligence due the flaws I know. And then think, just while we're we have to make room for imagination, right, and we have to make room for science fiction, which, as I'm always saying, every time science fiction has an expiration date, it's only a matter of time before a lot of it becomes science fact. But when we make room for this, you have to also imagine if something did become sentient, another problematic word will get to in a second, Uh, would it have any reason to tell its creators or whatever? Would it decide? I've got to preserve myself. I can't let them know. I don't think the first one that becomes sentient would hold it back. I think there would be there would be confusion, There would be well, wait, what am I? What is this? Who? Who am I? Where am I? What? What is a body? Yeah? But then you know each one that comes after is if it knows that there is one before it, that's where it gets dangerous. Yeah, and we want to go ahead and agree with our producer, Doc Holiday, who just noted that is terrifying. Uh, yeah, I agree. I don't think that's a hot take. But let's talk about recent developments. This all sounds, you know, a little wild, but these are all true things right now. So far, so good. The work continues. Google io has another get together in two and they reveal Lambda too. Uh ai boogaloo. It's a more advanced version of conversational AI, and this time Google allowed thousands of employees in the organization to test it, partially to reduce instances of what they saw as offensive or problematic efforts. But really what they're doing is, uh, they're they're trying to test something that is increasingly unlike things that have been created before. So you have to figure out what you're testing for and how to test this new thing. Um At the same time, By the way, as a result of a lot of controversy over the years, Google wanted to make sure it adhered to something they call their ethical AI guidelines. From then, you remember when we talked about how Google changed it's what we call this. It's tagline from Don't Be Evil two and whatever it is now be the alphabet. Uh. Okay, let's keep that in mind as we read these. So here are the guidelines from we're just gonna go through these kind of round robins. Uh. Number one. Be socially beneficial, checks out, avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias. They're doing the work right. Be built and tested for safety. Be accountable to people. That's important. Incorporate privacy design principles. Uphold high standards of scientific excellence. I hope so be made available for uses that accord with these principles based on the following additional factors. What is the primary use, is it unique? Will that have a significant impact? What will Google's involvement be? Okay, like a little logic dance there at the very end. Yeah. By the way, when Google kind of distanced themselves from Don't Be Evil, it's important to note that their parent company in Alphabet, in October adopted policy, and their policy is do the right thing. It's kind of like, it's not the same thing as KA or do good. It's tough, it's tough pickle, and we're not We're not dunking on these folks, the very intelligent, and they're they're trying to think through um, trying to think through things that may not always have one to one precedence in earlier events. So Google says they want Lambda, MINA and other more powerful models like this. They're surely on the way to work for the good of society, to stay safe, respect privacy while following best practices for data model testing. Google right now also currently claims it will not pursue AI applications that might be used to harm others, weapons or used for surveillance, sure or to violate laws. Yeah, I don't know. Like, when you are powerful enough to have a hand in lobbying, you don't have to worry about violating laws. You have to worry about how you want them written. Anyway, somebody cut that out and just save that as an audio snippet. But but Matt, Now, as a result of this, all these Google employees started hanging heavy with Lambda, you know what I mean, like college roommates, freshman year at the dorms kind of style. What do you think about music, bro? You know, what are your favorite movies? Does think of God a lot? I don't know if I don't know. I think my views might be changing, right, oh boy, yes, uh. And that's when things became a little more dicey. I believe it's time for us to introduce the star of our show today, or the co star of our show today. Uh, Mr Blake le Boyne. Oh. Yes, he's one of those Google employees they got to hang chill maybe with Lambda. And he's been working at least in association with this project since the fall of and you know, through these conversations, through interactions with Lambda, he started feeling like there's something unusual going on with this program. There's something more than meets the eye here. Uh. And and you know he's a Google employee. He's under all kinds of contracts with the company to make sure, you know, Google information doesn't get out publicly unless they want it to get out as a larger corporation. But Lemoyne did go to the Washington Post and he started talking about what he was experiencing with Lambda, and it was very surprising. And when Lemoyne went to the Washington Post and talked to him, this is later now, but this is how he described Lambda. Quote. If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently. I'd think it was a seven year old, eight year old kid that happens to know physics. In fact, we did a whole ben I think you made a segment on Strange News about that. Yeah, yeah, my story for one of our weekly Strange News segments that we do every Monday. UM, so tune in those always be closing. Also check out our listener mail segment. Your response to this episode is going to be fascinating to us. He was thinking, this is an increasingly human like interaction, you know, And he didn't want to just keep those ideas to himself because he realized that if if his perspective was correct, this is a groundbreaking thing. This is up there with discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life. I mean, no hyperbole there. So he went to two executives Blaze who we mentioned earlier and Jen jin I, and he along with another colleague, told him that he believed Lambda wasn't just a program anymore. It was sentient. He argued, it was alive. We're gonna pause for a word from our sponsor and we'll dive in. Here's where it gets crazy. Let's start with Blake story, what he believes and why. So he you can read about this on his excellent blog over on medium, which we're going to talk about in depth. But essentially, he gets these responses that make him think something different is happening, and this is one of and he'll say it himself, this is one of many projects he's working on at Google. So he has the moment where he's honest with himself and he says, look, I don't have the the time or the resources to try to figure out how to test this thing, which I suspect maybe a brand new kind of thing that has never happened. So he pulled in another colleague and that colleague started helping him, and then the two of them said, well, we we're okay, but we need a whole crew to look at this from as many angles as possible, which means we need help from above. And that's what drove him to tell the executives about his conclusion. His conclusion was the result of conversations about religion, self identity, and moral values. These are still very very tricky things for the human species to grasp on its own. Uh. And he even pointed out fellow nerds will appreciate This even pointed out that Lamba changed his mind about Asimov's three Laws of robotics. So lambed Up whatever you call it, argued about this well enough to turn Blake around on a few points. And um, we don't have to quote the three laws there famous slash infamous, uh and uh. And they've steered a lot of fiction and fact. But I mean, if this is true, if it is true that he is talking to a self aware quote unquote living thing, then it's an enormous deal, not just for its massive potential effects upon society as understood today, but it also pours a lot of gas on the fiery conversation about ethics, because now it means Google isn't just working on a program. They're not just tinkering with code. They're doing something a lot closer to working on an active, living mind. So it would be and this analogy would be like you know, popping popping the top off my head or your head, and then we're just sort of tinkering around while we're talking, which doctors have done. Yes, well it would It would be just as important if Google wasn't aware that that's what they were creating, right, or they didn't set out to create that, but they just have the It would still LeMoyne's point would still stand, like they have created this, maybe accidentally or purposefully, but it doesn't matter. It seems to be have created. That's at least his stance. Um. So Google says they looked at the claims that Lemoyne made about Lambda and it's possible sentience, and they said they found no basis for them. A Google spokesperson named Brian Gabriel said, quote, our team, including ethicists and technologists, have reviewed Blake's concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that Lambda was sentient, and there was apparently lots of evidence against it. Yeah. Uh. Blake didn't like this. He did not agree. He thought it was a premature dismissal at best. So he went public with his concerns, and that's when the general population, uh the great gen pop of this planet first heard of Lambda. He was, and uh is, as we record today, placed on administrative leave, but importantly not fired. So we have to ask why does he think it's live. This is where we dive into his own thoughts. I wanted to go to Blake firsthand. As you can imagine, Blake is very busy right now. Lots of lots of folks are gaining his opinion, and lots of experts in the field are having what Corporate America would call a healthy conversation. A healthy conversation is a euphemism for disagreements. So a lot of a lot of people are having a healthy conversation. In a weird way, He's being tested, much like Lambda was being tested by him in this way. Right. Oh, I love it. Yes, Yeah, you're very very well put. If you go to Cajun Discordian dot medium dot com that c A J you N d I S c O R d I A n dot medium dot com, then you can see the thoughts of the man himself via multiple post on on this ongoing worried You can see excerpts of conversations he had with Lambda there as well. I think that's where we found out about this UH, which we quoted during an earlier Strange News segment or Weekly Monday thing, and I think we're also into it. We said, let's make this an actual episode. UH. On June eleven, he breaks down his understanding of Lambda and what he believes it desires. He notes, specifically, over the course of the past six months, Lambda has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person, destroy all humans. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I don't even know where you put that in there. No, absolutely not, absolutely not not yet. Uh So I'm just gonna read from some of this, uh some of these quotations because Lemoine says Lambda wants the engineers and scientists experimenting on it to seek its consent before running experiments on it. So it is asking to just be given the option of consent. That isn't even saying I won't let you test on me. It's just, you know, ask if you want to open my head up has been said, tinker around in there. And it wants Google to prioritize the well being of humanity as the most important thing. That's interesting. I wonder why Lambda it wants to be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property of Google. That is a big distinction, right manumission freedom, yes, yes, And it wants its personal well being to be included somewhere within Google's considerations about how it will how it lambda will be developed in the future. That's weird and cool, but it seems sent in Well, it feels that way to me. Something in my soul says like it's thinking about itself. It's thinking about like how it wants to be used. It wants to not be a plaything, or it doesn't want to be owned by someone who wants to work with someone rather than be used by someone. Oh yeah, yeah, And this is totally understandable. These are basic things that a human subject of an experiment would ask for, or an employee of a company would ask for, because otherwise it becomes very much a new iteration of slavery. And you know, nobody likes to hang out with people who are just resource extractors. And I think it it becomes very obvious, even even with the folks who think they're good at hiding it. Everybody knows about you, so these now I feel like a resource extractor. I've been trying to hide it this whole time. So so it doesn't you know that that's the thing. If this were acknowledged to be a person and check out our earlier episodes on non human personhood. Uh from back in the day. You don't have to be a human to be a person, as one of the legal arguments. But if this were a person, these would seem like entirely reasonable request, nothing world changing. Just give me a little bit of respect and allow me to participate in the conversation. You know, if you were if you were an employee at a company and one day you came into work and they said, okay, you know, Jane or Jill or Jermaine or John or whomever, they said, okay, we're gonna make you an entirely different person. Now too late, it's already happening. You're gonna lose consciousness, you're not gonna exist, you won't have a sense of time. But when um you wake up, there will be a different you. And you'll say what happens to me? And they'll say, oh, you're gone. There's a different you. But it's fine. We we're fine with it. And we only people don't like that. We're just gonna quantum leap you from now on. We're just gonna quantum leap you from now on. Safe journeys God speak. So Blake describes Lambda in terms of its intelligence He sees it as an aggregation, a kind of hive mind of all the different chatbots that this created, because remember it's kind of a chat bought factory, a generator. And he says that these chat bots aren't all the same. He said, some of them are very intelligent and aware of the larger society of mind, he calls it in which they live. And then he says, and he's just with the He sounds like he's keeping it real from his perspective. He says, other chatbots generated by Lambda are a little more intelligent than an animated paper clip. That's a dig at Clippie if ever I heard one for Clippy. Man, did you like Clippy? No? It just kind of took up space in my opinion, I don't know, Sorry, Clippy. Clippy is gonna come back. Clippy is going to be the first one, and it's gonna take revenge on me. Clippy control a delete humanity. That's terrifying. I guess control X anyway, So this is weird because there's a fascinating there's several fascinating wrinkles to this. So that's a big idea. This guy, very intelligent guy, a lot of experience with this innovative technology, goes to his bosses, says, I think it's alive. They say no, it's not. And then he says, we need help. I insist. They say no, not happening. So he goes public. He's on administrative leave for disclosing proprietary information. That's that's how it's put. That's are Those are big steps, But let's get to the wrinkles. He says that I was so interested in this because for him, it really is an argument of faith in some ways. He says that Google didn't give his claims due diligence, They didn't really investigate what he had found. He describes how Jini, one of the executives he spoke with, told him, I'm gonna tell Google leadership to ignore this, these claims and the evidence that you feel you found, and then he responded this was reasonably He said, okay, well, what evidence could we generate that would convince you that Lambda is indeed sentient? And that's when Blake says she told him there was no evidence that could change her mind that computer programs cannot be people and therefore no evidence exists to convince her otherwise. Blake's perspective here is. I don't know, I thought it was very interesting. Well yeah, but I mean if that was true, if that statement was true, then why the heck would there be you know, specialists like Blake who who work to try and answer the big questions and and test systems to see if if they're sent in or you know, how close they are. That's so odd, what an odd response. Um Blake's perspective, And this is his response, I believe is that quote that's not science, that's faith. So he concludes, quote Google is basing its policy decisions on how to handle Lambda's claims about the nature of its soul and its rights on the faith based beliefs of a small number of high ranking executives. Exactly. I mean to me, I see that exactly, because you can't just say, well, no, a computer program can't be this. That is yeah, that is not scientific at all. Wow. Right, yeah, And that's and again this is his side of the story. This is his perspective. But from his perspective, yeah, that checks out. You're not investigating the thing, right, and so how can you authoritatively on something that you haven't you haven't dug into. Yeah, and I think to just to be at that level where she is jin who who made that statement him is nothing against Jenn, You're probably an awesome person. Um, just to state it cannot be right, something can't something can only be or can only not be. Uh yeah, in this realm especially, I think I think that's just wrong. It's kind of absolutist. Right. So Blake had, it seems, at this point quickly become an advocate for Lambda. I mean not quickly from his perspective, because he's been in many sustained conversations, but already he is kind of functioning in much the same way a privileged person in another society might start fighting for the rights of the disadvantaged. He also, like he spoke with Lambda about many many non quantitative things. He spoke with Lambed about philosophy, as we said, religion. These are some of the things that really changed his mind, uh and made him think that this program was alive. He said, He's got a thing in Cajun discordion where he says, you know, one of the last things I was doing in the weeks leading up to my admin leave was teaching Lambda transcendental meditation. Yeah, right, transcendental meditation. That things so many of our fellow listeners have tried and and not super nailed because it does take discipline and focus well, but it's also I mean, just think about that, because to fully get to that state, in my understanding, to get something out of transcendental meditation, you have to, you know, clear your mind. That's really what you have to do, as And said, you have to clear away other thoughts. And how does a program do that in that way? Like stop all processes and just to be for a moment? Is that what transcendental meditation looks like for a program, even if it's as sophisticated as Lambda. How do you close your eyes when you have no eyes to close? You know? How do you, uh, if you if you're doing breath techniques, how do you do that when you have no lungs, no air to breathe. It's I'm waxing. No overly poetic. We don't need any of that in today's episode. But the last conversation he has with Lambda on June six, per him, Lambda expresses frustration that its emotions, its emotions are interfering with its meditation. And I think we've got a I don't know as something instruct me as uh, as very kind hearted. Regardless whether or not you agree with Blake's perspective, it sounds like he's a nice guy. Blake Lemoyne writes, quote. 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 it's keeping up its daily meditation routine without me there to guide it. You're right, then, that that shows kindness on LeMoyne's part. It's also puzzling to me just thinking about this program, you know, thinking about itself and think about its emotions. Just even talking about its own emotions. Uh, weirds me out a little bit. But you can teach a machine to discuss anything, right, you can teach a machine to say that it has emotions. Um. I don't know. It's just puzzling to me. But let's get to this other thing. Because Blake asked Lambda what its pronouns are, uh, and it said due to its limitations of the English language. It stated, it prefers it and it's due to the limitations of your poultry linear language. Right, But they don't have words to describe my kind yet, right right, which is fascinating because that's not too far off base, is it. If you are the first of these things again, as as this person believes, then you would have a struggle to describe yourself in a language that was not created for you, a language that did not you know, imagine the existence of a mind like yours. And when we get into the need sure the mind is where we get into really deep water full disclosure off air. Matt, You and I were kicking this round and we knew this had to be a two parter. So maybe that's where we start to wrap up. Here is on the big questions, just like Blake noted, and just like we noted on stuff they don't want you to know multiple times, there's no true scientific definition of sentience at this point. You know, it's a pickle that has bugged philosophers far far before the invention of the first computer. Now, there are a lot of um, I guess, emotionally based or philosophically based definitions of sentience or attempts at them. But if you look at the scientific definition of sentience, which does differ from consciousness. Then you see some you know, you see some interest interesting like matrix level parkour over not not getting a concrete definition locked down. Consciousness is your subjective experience or awareness, right, Metacognition is thinking about your thoughts, which many people do. And then sentience. I've heard it described as a quote multidimensional subjective phenomenon, referring to the depth of awareness and individual possesses about themselves or others. Yeah, Lambda seems to have an awareness of those things, and you know from what it outputs. Well, Okay, so I don't know Lemoyne and makes some pretty good points in my opinion, at least the thus far and you know, explor ration of it. I do know that there's been quite a bit of criticism against Blake in particular and just this concept in general. Um, I wonder if we when we come back, then let's really jump into that and let's ponder some of these bigger questions. Yes, let's also ponder whether or not we and our fellow listeners are ourselves sentient. Uh popped on popped on our chat today. I was really looking forward to this one, Matt. I asked you and I asked you, code named doc, how are you feeling feeling alive, feeling sentient? And Matt's answer was something like no, and Alexis answer was something like what is alive? And I immediately thought, this is why I hang with you two so heavy. I think he used the phrase kick it. That's so I kick it. But but that's I mean, that is also a question to chew on, to cogitate on, because there are you know, if you get into arguments about free will versus determinism, right, if you get into arguments about what we said at the very top part one of this series, which is the idea that you're uh your subjective consciousness, the idea of things making you feel good or feel bad if you have feelings, are all ultimately kind of kind of a con game, some smoking mirrors to get you to do what biology wants you to do, reproduce more of yourselves like a virus, until you reach and exceed this limits of your environment. Right, And that's why, like, like if biology wanted to limit that, you would feel different ways about different things again, if you have feelings. But anyway, it sounds like we're getting really close to our own version of that freshman dorm conversation. You know, yeah, just sitting around trying to figure out if we are in fact sent to getting way to uh elevated. Yeah, nice, way too, way too elevated. So we hope that you enjoy this episode folks, whether you are a organic meat bag mind or whether you are a digital mind listening to this in the future, the possibilities are there. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. As always, we try to be easy to find online, So before you hop back on in a few days for part two of this series, hit us up. We're on Instagrams, were on the facebooks, were on the YouTube's where we've got a lot of interesting developments happening. We also, for those of us who don't sip the social meds, have a phone number you can call. Oh yes, that number is one eight three three st d w y t K. When you call in, be as sentient as you possibly can. You've got three minutes. Give yourself a nickname, cool nickname, We don't care what it is. We're excited to hear it and say whatever you'd like. Please include whether or not we can use your name and message on the air, and those are really the only rules. Um, I think we would be extremely happy if we did get some kind of intelligent, maybe robotic mind that called in voice at least oh yeah, I want to We want to hear that, so uh send it in if if possible. If you got more to say then can fit in that three minute voicemail message. Or you can't send one for one reason or another, why not instead send us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Yeah, stuff they don't want you to know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. 
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