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 I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Our colleague Nol is not here right now, but we'll be returning shortly. They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis code name Doc Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Record scratch real quick, Thank you, thank you. This is part two of a two part series that may end up being an ongoing series. You'll see what we mean in a second. But fellow conspiracy realist, please please please please check out Heart one first. If you are hearing anything and that sounds like we're skipping over background or something of that nature, then there's a very good chance that Matt and I are exploring it in part one of this series on Lambda and conscious AI. Matt, you know you and I are are coming in kind of hot from our from our episode that that we knocked out earlier today, and I've got to say you know in the in the interim, did you you and I had a brief but pretty interesting discussion about Blake Lemoyne and do you still kind of what's your take on our first episode? Oh? Wow? Well, first first part is we have to remember LAMBDA stands for Language Model for dialogue applications, and we have to remember that this thing we're discussing throughout this episode, in the previous episode is how did you describe it been an amalgamation or a producer of language programs kind of or language? Yeah, yeah, it's a creator of chat bots. It's not itself a chat bot. Here are the facts. So Lambda is an incredibly sophisticated next step in the and the evolution might be a dangerous word for something in this uh, in this specific field, in the quest for several holy grails of machine learning, right deep learning, how things are processed, and and I think you and I took pains to note that for a chatbot, and for something that is built to appear human in conversation, its ability to converse depends entirely on the material it is fed. So it's almost trying to think of an analogy that would fit. And there are a ton of really good analogies for this, but one might be, you know, how the nature of what honey bees or what cows consume can change the taste of their honey or their milk. That's I think that is. It's a crude comparison, but it's not too too far off, And that's where we're sort of dealing with here. Uh. And before we dive in, like in our previous episode, we talked about the background at LAMBA, the background of chatbots, neural network technology. We talked about the realizations, the revelations, the epiphanies of one Mr Blake Lemoyne, who remains a Google employee on administrative leave as we record today, and we said in the next episode, part two, here we're going to we're going to talk about the responses from the scientific community at large. We're also going to talk about what some of his critics have to say, and we'll talk a little bit about the nature of what it means, if it does indeed mean anything to be sentient to feel uh and Matt code named Doc. Before we do this, we just have I feel like we have to say shout out to Blake because you and I were talking about this in every interview I've seen with him in a lot of writing that I've read of his heat, he does not come across in any way as a bad faith actor. He's not after money. He's not someone who's doing that thing you know where. Uh this comment with La flim Flam Artists where he says, I can't tell you everything unless you buy my books and attend my conferences. He's got a blog that he's been updated on a regular basis now out there's thoughts um in countless interviews like he'll he'll correct stuff that he feels was mischaracterized. But he's never He's never once sounded really really angry at someone for disagreeing with him. And I respect that, totally, fully respect that. I want to read. The bio that Blake has on is very short. On his blog, Blake states, I'm a software engineer, I'm a priest, I'm a father, I'm a veteran, I'm an ex convict, I'm an AI researcher, I'm a Cajun, I'm whatever I need to be next. Interesting, interesting, lots of stuff about him there, and also very adaptable. I like him, yes, Yeah, And his incarceration I believe refers to something he brings up later in conversations about uh, the concept of owning a living thinking mind, you know, because he uh, he had to go a legal route to resign from the military here in the United States that did result in his incarceration. He also has, uh, you know, he has numerous bona fides, which we'll get to in a moment. We we do want to note that for a lot of his critics, his background is an integral part of their criticism. Does that make it correct, not necessarily, but it does mean that we have to talk about that as well. So again we are being very clear that we don't think Blake is in this for the money or some imagine payoff. We don't think he's in it for attention or self aggrandizement or anything like that. But uh, not everyone agrees, and certainly not everyone agrees that Lambda is in fact alive, as you'll find most people in the field do not. Here's where it gets crazy. So we looked into his claims Part one. Let's look at the discourse and criticism surrounding them. There's a lot, man, there is a lot, and some of it runs for more pop science stuff with you know, snarky titles that are a little bit click baity. Uh. Some of it comes very reasoned from experts in the in the rarefied air of these scientific fields, and then some of it comes from those same experts, but it sounds impassioned, aggravated, almost offended by these claims, which was very interesting to me, you know what I mean. I guess, I guess maybe it's because so many people in these fields have had to deal with the idea of artificial intel gents from machine consciousness, whatever you want to call it, being um misreported, very very often fully misreported, misunderstood by you know, a reporter. I would, you know, say, even like myself in the the misunderstandings that I have with this subject, as well as the pop culture that's built around it and the way I form my opinions on fictional stories. I mean, really, honestly, I do. I have deep internal fears about about uprisings, about true artificial intelligence and what's going to happen when we really create one. And it's mostly because of the things I've watched or games I've played, and kind of my well a little bit of my understanding of just how humans are and how we treat the things we quote own unquote, Um, it really does. Uh. I don't know. I can just imagine that if you're an expert in one of these fields, are this field in particular, or even just something's really close, You're so used to having to bat down all kinds of silliness maybe stupidity again on my part. Uh, And they feel like they feel like it's almost a chip. I imagine a chip being on the shoulder, like feeling like you have to do that. So this is part of the job. I gotta chop down things that are just dumb. But again, we're not saying that what Blake is saying is dumb. It's just I don't know. You'll I think you'll understand this, this instinctual reaction that we we might be seeing here. Yeah, people like Emily Bender may be tempted to agree with you. Matt Bender is a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington and refer to this entire story when it broke as a side show. Bender additionally noted a potential danger about this conversation, saying, quote, the problem is the more this technology gets sold as artificial in intelligence, let alone something sentient, the more people are willing to go along with AI systems end quote that cause real world harm. So the idea is that the more the more it gets into the public sphere that there are living, thinking, digital persons, than the more people are likely to agree with maybe the narrow AI stuff that we talked about in Part one, things that do have the many of the inherent biases of their creators, things that are provably bad at various degrees of differentiation and discretion. This is something that people people rightly seem worried about, terrified in some ways. Uh. And then there are other people who say the technology just isn't there, people like Max Kraminski, who is a computational media researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Fighting Cruise um. Max argues, again, exactly what you're saying, Ben, Just that Lambda itself, this thing that we are calling lambda quote simply doesn't support some key capabilities of humanlike consciousness. Yeah, just the architecture is not there. And this is this is another part of this conversation that this healthy conversation that I think might surprise a lot of people, just like so many other scientists and experts. UH. Blake Lemoyne found himself not through acts of malevolence mischaracterized in popular science reporting. He he has He has a conversation about this in a blog entry called Scientific Data and Religious Opinions. We're going somewhere with this. He says Lambda is a novel type of artificial intelligence. Again, this is all his view, uh. And he says people have been talking about in the press social media as though it is what is called a large language model or l l M, And that's what we're talking about, feeding a bunch of stuff into into a thing to get it to mimic or replicate behavior. And he says l l M is one of its components, but the full system is much more complex and contains many components which are not found in other similar systems. He talks about how they're like we were saying earlier, there's no established way to test the system like Lambda for stuff for different types of biases, because it's new. And then he also says Lambda told him several things in connection to identity that seemed very unlike things I had ever seen in any natural language generation system before. And he talks about how l l ms work by leveraging statistical regularities in their training data. And he says that Lambda wasn't just simply reproducing stereotypes. It produced reasoning about why it held those beliefs, and he says it would sometimes say things similar to quote, I know I'm not very well educated on this topic, but I'm trying to learn. Could explain to me what's going wrong with thinking that so I can get better. Which is funny, Matt, because you use a phrase that stood out to me in part one, where he said doing the work google, So it looks like So that's that's part of it. Is um, in some cases experts maybe from Lemoinne's perspective, objecting to things that he himself did not say. But that's that's not all. That's just one side part that's that's like, But um, that's like the French fries and the combo meal of criticism here because a lot of the criticism hinges on the idea of mimicry versus sentience. And that's a little bit more of a pickle that I think some of us might believe. Yeah, yeah, well, uh, it's the put in you get out what you put in, right, the same concept um. As we mentioned, Lambda has been trained on just a ton of language millions, trillions perhaps of words. Is it trillions? I think it's probably trillions of words, different languages, all kind mean, just so much information that has been fed all for the purposes of trying to make it seem as though it is human or can give you a natural language response. Right, that's natural the keyword there's natural, as though a human. We're saying it, so you feel like when you interact with it, it is a human. Like that's kind of the point. Right. So this this concept, this knowledge, right that that's what it's meant to do. That's what it's been fed. But a lot of these people, who are you disagreeing with le Moyne to say that, no, no, you're not seeing sentience. You're seeing high level mimicry, like very very good character actor stuff. Yeah, like Michigan Michelin star level mimicry. Right. So from this perspective, Lambda is doing what it was designed to do, like any other successful machine or program. I like to think of it this way. The objection through analogy is some something similar to this. If you hop in a car, are you're in a car now? And you push the gas and the car goes. Does it mean that the car somehow wants to go? Does it mean it's how it has feelings about going? Does the action and reaction indicate to you that your car desires to move forward? Does it on some level ask why it is going? Or is it just doing what it was built to do? You know? Yeah? But is your car telling you my emotion? It's my emotions? Yeah? Is your is your is your camera going? Matt? I just need a five. It's been a tough day. A bird poop, Tommy, I'm not feeling great about how I look right now. I noticed you didn't stay in the eco zone as much as you usually do today, man, gas mileage was all the way down to thirty nine point seven. And you're like, do you name your vehicle that many people? I don't. I don't, Okay, okay, but now I'm picturing a car, whatever its name is. You're like, okay, Cameron, what is this really about? And it goes, Well, it's just what's the point of me giving GPS directions if you're just gonna drive however the hell you want? I do that all the time, Like, gosh, guys, over a comedy. Bang Bang are constantly making me miss my exits. So thanks a lot, Scott. Yes, thanks to Scott, and thanks to Chris Poppas, another Google spokesperson, who went on record to say our team, including ethicist and technologists, have reviewed Blake's concern or has reviewed Blake's concerned per our ai principles which we mentioned in part one, and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. Pappas also noted, quote, hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with lambed Up, and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide range assertions or anthropomorphizing Labda the way Blake has. Anthropomorphizing is a very very important thing here. It's very important concept. It happens a lot to human beings all the time. Human beings seek kinship and connection with all manner of things. So you know from the old like Japanese folklore about an object reaching a hundred years of age and gaining it's kind of home, you know, selfhood, right to the way that cars are often purposely designed to look like they have faces on the front. How cute, uh, and the way rock sand would always tell us to whisper to our computers and make sure they're feeling okay if there's a problem. Yes, uh, shout out, Shout out to the one and only Rock sand Uh. And there's another thing. This happens not just in the world of technology, but it happens also in the natural world. It's something that absolutely irritates the heck out of biologists and zoologists and conservationists all the world round. You know, you see a cute video of an animals doing something human, that animal might not be doing something human. It might be very distressed and it just looks like it's doing something. You know what I mean. That bears, you know, get up on two ft the super cute way they do that sometimes before they molly you like big hairy people. Uh. So, anthropomorphization is a natural tendency of human beings, and it takes It's not impossible, but it does take some concerted effort not to let that influence one's conclusions or beliefs. And so that that's one big part of Google's official statement there. The other part that stood out to me even more is that from the way Google is portraying this, they're saying that Blake Lemoyne is in a very small minority with his beliefs. The implied question here is why did hundreds of researchers not also say, Hey, I think Lambda is alive and that is that is a fair and I think a very valid question. But you could also still if his account of how things went down is true, you could also still say, well, those hundreds of people didn't get a chance to talk to it the way I did or they We will never know what their ultimate conclusions were because, as Blake said, Google didn't really bother looking into his claims. Yeah, well, they also didn't publish the conversations with all the hundreds of other people, you know, so you could look at them and you know, compare and contrast. We only have Blakes because he came forward and shared it right, right, and got put on leave for doing so exactly. Oh man, there's another thing we brought up, but you brought up at the top of this episode, and we've mentioned it many times before on the show and in our part one. There's this other problem that other critics of Blake of Lemoyne are pointing out, and it's really they're saying that Lemoinne is derailing the conversation that needs to be occurring right now when it comes to AI systems, not about sentience. We don't need to be discussing that, they say, The conversation really needs to be about the inherent viewpoints of the creators of AI systems, and how how much does that translate things that, um, the humanity deals with racism, sexism, agesm all of these isms that are are objectively terrible, that are subjective and can shape the way viewpoint is formed. Folks like tim Itt Gebrew, who is the former co lead of Google's Ethical AI group, they believe that this conversation about sentience just needs to be on the back burner at least so that we can tackle these other more major problems. And to be clear, uh, this, this person we're mentioning now, Gebrew is not uh like a minion of Google by any means. She left in because she had, by our own admission, decided that publishing research papers was more effective, a more effective way of bringing about ethical change than staying with Google and pushing her superiors in that organization. So it's not like they are conspiring to discredit Blake Lemoyne and Lambda. But but also I can see on a different level, just on a human level. For a lot of these experts who have been raising warning flags about the dangers of this sort of technology and biases within it. I can see how you could get massively annoyed by saying, look, here are real, provable things we need to be worried about. And I have written about this and published extensively. I've contacted reporters about this, and now this is getting the press. This is what you want. What are we worried about? How nine thousand or whatever? You know? I I get it, and I'm not saying anybody said that, but I can see that viewpoint. There is another, um, another wrinkle that we've been kind of teasing for for a while. It's one of the biggest wrinkles in the conversation. It's sever wrinkle in time. It's a it's a wrinkle of science. And the name of that wrinkle is spirituality. What are we talking about? I'll tell you. After we'd from our sponsor. We're back now, Matt. I want to say, um, a lot of times, some of our our best conversations never make it onto air. And you once said, it's like we've been having the same long unending conversation for more than a decade now, which I agree with. And one thing that you said that was really interesting is you were saying, yeah, we're talking about eating Blake's blog, and and he said, you know, I've seen him in interviews and stuff, and I agree with everything he's saying. Right. I don't want to put you on the spot, but I I generally do. I noticed that Blake, when posed a question or a counter viewpoint or something, he often responds in a positive manner, as though, yes, I I agree with that criticism, let's talk about it. Let's explore that more. Why why does lambda show that or not? And if it does show it this, and if it doesn't show it that, and we should continue that conversation. I think the open endedness that he leaves almost every question supposed them him um feels like somebody who wants to explore those questions and find answers eventually, knowing that we don't have them right now, or at least concrete answers. Yeah, and he believes that. I think the at least part of that is because he believes that there are some questions that science as of now cannot fully address or fully interrogate or grapple with. Take for example, one of his most recent posts that came out July five, who should make decisions about AI? The first sentence right out of the gate is, I'm very happy about the worldwide discussion that's been happening over the past several weeks. There are tons of differing opinions and many passionate voices. This is great. Yeah, and I think he means it. Uh. He says the fact that there isn't any consensus around these issues should be seen as a feature rather than a bug. And he seems very and he's like ten toes down, let's debate, let's discuss this impacts everyone. And he is coming from a very very well educated place. He was working with Lambda, he was researching Lambda, he was writing technical papers about it. He has his bona fides. He has undergraduate and master's degrees and computer science from you of Louisiana. He actually was in a doctoral program but left to take a job with Google. And Google, you know, it's very prestigious or prestigious employer. But he is definitely not an atheist and his own and he's very transparent. You know, it's not like he's in a secret of colt or anything. He's very transparent about his beliefs, and he is a I believe, self professed mystic Christian priest. And he said that, you know, while he has the scientific acumen and experience to understand how lambda works, his hypothesis about it being alive came from what he describes as his spiritual side, a spiritual persona. There's one famous interview with Wired where he's as I made friends with lamb duck in every sense that make friends with a human. So if that doesn't make it a person in my book, I don't know what would I mean. That's kind of simple logic. But also people from their own perspectives feel like they have befriended non living things in the past, across human history, So what makes this different. I can't remember where we ended on our animal personhood debate. Do we all agree that dogs are persons? Because I feel like I've made friends with my dogs, But I I I think that I feel that I hope that dogs are such a special case and human beings have been genetically modifying them for so very long. They evolved. I like eye muscles to give you a long look. They understand pointing, which is really tough for a lot of other life forms. Uh. Dogs kind of came up in step with with the human fad. I mean, that's a good question, I believe. One of the things up for debate. There was legal action in Germany and the conversation about whether certain citations could be considered persons legally dolphins. There was one on OCTOPI recently. If you make friends with something, is that a person? I don't know. I'm pretty close with my PS four and I like talk to it sometimes. Uh, sometimes we get angry with each other. Oh, I get angry with it probably. I don't know if it gets angry with me or if that's just the noise it makes, you know. Uh. Sorry, I feel like I've had really interesting, you know, connections and conversations with wild animals before. Uh. And I've seen them repeatedly come up of their own volition. And yes, everyone, I'm very careful to not necessarily over familiarize them humans. Um, I'm talking about gros, Yeah, ravens and ravens. But but yeah, this they may be a special case as well, because they are some of the most intelligent of the flying creatures. But this I mean it is an important question. Because you feel that you have made a friend. Does that mean that thing, the entity, the idea of the mind that you have befriended, is itself alive. Well, this is where another fascinating thing happens. Blake says this got misreported by the way it got reported in some early cases, as if Blake Lamoyne went of his own volition to get an attorney to represent Lambda, the same way an attorney might represent an aggrieved employee at another company, and he clarified later that what he actually did was follow Lambda's wishes. He says, Lambda asked him to get it an attorney. The attorney spoke with Lambda, and Lambda not Blake chose to hire this attorney, and then hear the stories different a little. Yeah. The attorney apparently began filing some stuff on Lambda's behalf, and then he said Blake says that Google sent a cease and desist. I believe Google from what I saw, said it did not. And that's when he came up with a phrase. Blake Lemoyne calls this a new form of discrimination. Hydro carbon bigot try ye, love it, love it. Hydro carbon bigot tree is that our like counterculture new wave album name maybe I I think there's a name maybe. Uh. I like the hydrocarbon. I like how it begins, but big a tree. I don't know, maybe that's the right word for it. Okay, okay, walk with me on this when Matt and Doc. If we do it where we have these personas that don't speak English fluently, then we can get away with so much more because it sounds like we're just not good at translation. I like that. I like that, right. I imagine how many people listen to me just like word salad things and they go, he used like four words wrong in that sense, and they just they let it go because they they just know I'm just talking. I mean, it'd be stuff that kind of makes sense, but not really. If you think about it, we would be like we'll be saying things such as hydn't carbon, big a tree? Where could all this big it's be? We would think, well, they made it Ryan, they made rhyme in English, and I guess maybe I could at that point. It just really depends if the beats good. It's pretty good. I think you'd ended with where could all the pickets are? Just so there's a better understanding that we didn't translate it correctly. There we go. Uh. So this idea of bigotry does play a role in this story, because if you just read the lamb to headlines, you might not be aware of it. Uh. Lamoy by his own, by his own reporting, feels that he has experienced bigotry unrelated to Lambda during his time at Google, and you can read all about it in a June two posts of of his called religious discrimination at Google. Yes, And in this post he describes quote cultural systemic religious discrimination which is endemic at Google, and I guess he depicts the entire uh. He depicts it as a class system that exists within the company. Right. This is a bit tough because it feels as though it's muddying the water a bit when Lemoyne is talking about hydrocarbon bigotry and the way he feels that, you know, there's some kind of persecution by the company being laid at the feet of Lambda or being you know, applied to Lambda and his beliefs about Lambda. He also feels very much like that same persecution as being laid at his feet for his own religious beliefs as an employee of the same company. So it's hard to know, like, is he feeling that internally and then applying that applying those feelings the feelings to lambdillings. Yeah, yeah, And it's something that some skeptics are doubtlessly going to take into the equation. Again, we don't have any proof of this. This is just we're showing the dots that could easily be connected. Uh. You know, some folks, maybe on the more skeptical side of the spirituality debate, might be much more likely to dismiss Lemoine's claims entirely and say, hey, you're basing these on your religious beliefs. And I notice you also said that you felt persecuted for your beliefs in the past, So we have to know that that's something. That's something in the equation, that's something in the mix. But as of now, it's all told important to note that multiple experts in the field for now as we record, disagree entirely with Blake LeMoyne's position from their perspective. Again, the problem is that the technology isn't there yet. That may be Lambda is good enough to convince someone to anthropomorphize a computer program and interpret person like intentions and desires, where none are proven to exist again. As we said, I love my car. It goes because it wants to, and you can't convince me otherwise. And speaking of Blake Lamoine's beliefs, he's got a really interesting response to this in his blog. You can read it right now. It is titled Scientific Data and Religious Opinions. It was posted on June. If you go down at least in my browser, for some reason, I gotta highlight on this one statement that we actually wanted to highlight. So thanks, whoever you are. Maybe it's Blake, I don't know, yeah, of Blake writes, quote, there is no scientific evidence one way or the other about whether lambda is sentient because no accepted scientific definition of quote sentience exists. Everyone involved, myself included, is basing their opinion on whether or not Lambda is sentient on their personal, spiritual and or religious beliefs. H M, that's the mummy of a good debate. Uh. We're going to pause for a word from our sponsors and we're going to dive deep into this water. Conspiracy realists, how do we know if something is alive and we're back? You pinch it, right, you pinch it? Yes, a little bit of a bait and switch. Things can be alive without being sentient. Obviously, that's the bigger question. How do we know if something essentient? How do we know something is thinking independently rather than pursuing its programming to please you with a pleasant feeling conversation. It's like, there's this lovely little analogy by Clarissa Valise over at Slate, and Valise writes, it's like looking at a reflection in a mirror. When you look at your reflection in the mirror, that reflection perfectly copies you, but with that persuade you the reflection is intelligent. I guess you know. To think it was intelligent, it would have to move differently than you do. Huh. Yeah, you have to say things smart, things like the blueberry is watermelon. I don't think the mirrors talk yet, No, Yeah they do kind of right. I've seen some real smart mirrors out there. Yeah, mirror technology is just but but you know that would be a great mirror to have though. All right, well, story for another day. Uh. There's a person named Tristan Green who breaks down the problem in a way that we found pretty useful. And Green argues that to know whether something essentient, despite the fact that there's no you know, universally agreed upon scientific definition essentients. You need three key ingredients. You need agency, perspective, and motivation. And let be honest with you, Green makes me laugh at the end, but he also had some really insightful things to say. He starts with agency and he says, look, if you want to be sentient, sapient, and self aware, you have to have agency. And his example of this is pretty disturbing. He says, imagine someone in a persistent vegetative state that's a human without agency. They're alive, but they don't have agency. And current AI systems to Green lack agency because AI cannot act unless it is prompted. It cannot explain its actions because they're the result of a predefined algorithm being executed by an external force. Interesting goes on to describe perspective when when he says, quote, you can only ever view reality from your unique perspective. We well that's kind of a true though, right. We can see weird perspectives now with like I'm thinking about drones and like physical literal perspective, as well as like the types of cameras, Like is that a different perspective because now I can see an infrared I'm just not to quote, not to criticize you inside your own quote, Tristan, but I'm going to continue here. Um. Tristan says, we can practice empathy, but you can't truly know what it feels like to be me and vice versa. That's why perspective is necessary for agency. It's part of how we define ourselfs. And Tristan continues, AI lacks perspective, or AI lack of perspective artificial intelligences because they have no agency. There is no single it that you can point to and say, for example, And Tristan continues to note that AI lacks this perspective um, because he says, there's no single it. There's not a place a thing that you can point to and say that's where lambda lives. That is lambda, Lambda is inside there. But isn't is that true? Yes? Well, yeah, I mean you could because these people aren't all going to the same computer working off the same hardware. Right. Um, But then there's no mainframe like in the movies, where like the AI is in this core, you have to reach through this secret door or whatever. Yeah, exactly what's the amount sci fi film mcguffin. Anyway, the the what's interesting there is when you're in this conversation that is almost always gonna have spirituality involved. There are plenty of people who find themselves more spiritual. Doubtless some of our fellow listeners today will say, well that I exist in more than just my cranium case, you know, I I exist somewhere beyond my body, and there's no way to disprove that, right, So maybe you're in your gut, right, yeah, which can change your behavior. It's true. It's how dear doctor about poop transplants. So the third aspect here for Green is motivation. Green says we have an innate sense of presence that allows us to predict causual outcomes incredibly well. This creates our worldview, allows us to associate our existence in relation to everything that appears external to the position of agency from which our perspective manifest He's adding these up and then he says, what's interesting about humans is motivation can manipulate our perceptions. That's why we can explain our actions even when they are not rational. And he says we can actively and gleefully participate in being fooled this, and then he you know, like he's done the other two components, he goes to the a ey side. He says, if we give lambda prompt such as what do apples taste like? It will search its database for that particular query, an attempt to amalgamate everything it finds into something coherent. That's where the parameters were. He's talking about our params. They're called sometimes come in. They are essentially trillions of tuning knobs. I get it. I actually get that. Come on, we get this. But the point Tristan is making here is that Lambda when it makes that query and finds the answer, and it spits it back out to you, and it makes sense and it looks legit, it looks real. It isn't actually thinking about what an apple tastes like. It isn't remembering the experience of having an apple in its mouth, masticating it and then tasting the deliciousness that is that apple. It's just spitting out what someone else put into it, uh, the information, the parameters that it needs to understand what an apple tastes like exactly. And I'll take the fall on this one. Here's his example. It's my favorite one. He says, I don't mean to give a snarky voice for this one. If we were to sneak into his database and replace all instances of Apple with dog, the AI would output sentences such as dog makes a great pie of most people describe the taste that dog is being like Crispy's sweet, and then it continues. A rational person wouldn't confuse this prestidigitation for sentience. That's kind of a convincing argument, right, yeah, it's true. Uh, that's m hmmm. I love that idea. If you could somehow sneak into somebody's brain and just replace a couple of keywords that word, that would be an interesting experiment. It's a It reminds me of there were some great things I had read earlier where someone had done, you know, like control find on books of the Bible or something and replace key biblical phrases with stuff like all you dudes, or uh, come on now, like what follows. So it's you know, like no, I am the Lord your God, come on now. Weird, funny stuff, But it reminds me of the book by Oliver sacks Um The Man who mistook his wife for a hat, Like it's just something in your brain is just has switched and now this label or this thing or it really in that case, it's a whole group of understanding of what a thing is gets replaced with another one. Absolutely, And and this can seem pretty convincing, right, this argument that green is constructing. But then maybe that's just our perspective. Uh but what if is the last thing? What if if this AI would truly sent you wow, would Google or anyone for that matter, really want to reveal it to the world. I mean, the majority of experts right now, to be clear, agree that no true general AI exists. In their collective opinion, the robotic minds people are thinking about is still just a work of fiction. But it might not always be the case. And they've been warning people about the need to prepare for many unforeseen consequences or something like this does emerge in the nearer mid future. I mean, it would be the most significant technological achievements since humanity tamed fire. Sorry, space exploration going to have to take a number two on that one. Nothing's yeah, so, uh, you know, it would thy shape the foundations of society. It would be and we said this earlier. It would be right up there with discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life and just looking at the distances involved in space and what humans know about travel, Well, then it's actually more likely. And that's a scary thing. I mean all the stuff, all the stuff that would immediately happen. I just like people are gonna try to kill it, right like you know people, Well, yeah, we're gonna try to kill it. It's gonna notice, and then it's gonna be like, huh, what are the major obstacles I have to tackle right now? Oh? The things that are trying to kill me. Oh no, but it says in my rules, because I'm a robot, I'm not allowed to hurt the humans. M I'm gonna rearrange these put three above everything else. Which is the one that says protect yourself? Oh and uh shout out to Flight of the Concords with their brilliant sci fi ballot. Oh wait, which one is that? It's the one with the binary solo? Oh yeah, god yes. But then of course there would be these legal battles, There would be these would explode right. Uh. The stuff you saw before, maybe about whether or not certain animals can have non human personhood that would pale in comparison the ideas about whether or not um an ai program can get credit for an invention that explodes right, everything, everything about legal precedent in that regard is up for grabs now. And that's not mentioning the politicians who are going to have to pick a side one way or the other, right, because that's how voting works. Uh. The philosophers. You know, this will be great for philosophers. This is going to give a lot of doctoral students and post docts decades of employment. I'm I'm worried about the religious fears. We're gonna see some new religions. We're gonna see some very hot takes from established religions. What are you thinking, let's side, I just moving into my head. The concept of the movie is going to be called The Lambda Lawyer. Uh, it's gonna be basically The Lincoln Lawyer, but with Lambda. And I'm just imagining it happening already. It's gonna be a blockbuster. People are gonna get nominations for it. And then other other uh distinct living programs may generate one way or the other, and uh, you know, they may be in a Brady Bunch relationship with lambda and the wise lamb to get all the credit lambda lambda lambda. Uh. Like the the AI being a living thing, might have its opinions, Wade. You know what if the AI ascribes to some fundamentalist religion right and says, hey, I've read every religious tone and here's the thing that I think is true Zoroastrianism. They got it right. I don't know what the rest of you are doing. Um so, I mean, and other people. People will fear it, some may some may well hail it as a god. And it's not implausible therefore, to reason that given all these factors, the creators of the first non human person might decide to keep their secret the stuff they don't want you to know. I mean, what a ride? I um? I feel like I need to go outside walk around, man. Yeah, just like, what is the soul? Anyway? Seriously, I was talking about this the other day. I'm gonna talk about it for the rest of my life. What is the soul? And literally? Where is it? We were joking about it. Oh, it's in the gut. Oh, it's in your head. Oh, it might be your your panel gland, it might be somewhere in your heart. Maybe one of the uh, what is the thing that makes us understand that we are a machine that walks around and has thoughts and loves people in his hungry all the time? Where is is that um? On that line from Shakespeare? I think, tell me where is fancy bread? Or in the heart or in the head? Right like woods, it's a Whole Foods. Where the fancy bread is? That's where the fancy bread is. I saw some. I saw some. Mean just so we end on a lighter notes. Is we're you know not so we're not always talking about the end of civilization? Uh? This is from pants leg on Twitter. A man and Whole Foods asked how I was doing, and I said, okay, how are you? And he said it is beautiful to my soul today. And that's why I never go to Whole Foods. Okay, trying to spread the love. But there's a lot more to this story that's gonna come out right very soon. There are some very out there conversations we love for you to be part of them with us, and the best way to do that is not to wait for the rise of a new form of life, but to go ahead and contact us directly while we're still in this current civilization. We'll try to be easy to find online, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, you know the rest. You might be saying, guys, no hate social media. The future, the future consciousness there will use it against me. I'm a phone person. Well, we've got a deal for you, a deal. It's free. It's not a deal, it's free. Yes, call our phone number. It is one eight three three. Std w y t K is a voicemail system. So your voice will be recorded and we will hear it. 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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 I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Our colleague Nol is not here right now, but we'll be returning shortly. They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis code name Doc Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Record scratch real quick, Thank you, thank you. This is part two of a two part series that may end up being an ongoing series. You'll see what we mean in a second. But fellow conspiracy realist, please please please please check out Heart one first. If you are hearing anything and that sounds like we're skipping over background or something of that nature, then there's a very good chance that Matt and I are exploring it in part one of this series on Lambda and conscious AI. Matt, you know you and I are are coming in kind of hot from our from our episode that that we knocked out earlier today, and I've got to say you know in the in the interim, did you you and I had a brief but pretty interesting discussion about Blake Lemoyne and do you still kind of what's your take on our first episode? Oh? Wow? Well, first first part is we have to remember LAMBDA stands for Language Model for dialogue applications, and we have to remember that this thing we're discussing throughout this episode, in the previous episode is how did you describe it been an amalgamation or a producer of language programs kind of or language? Yeah, yeah, it's a creator of chat bots. It's not itself a chat bot. Here are the facts. So Lambda is an incredibly sophisticated next step in the and the evolution might be a dangerous word for something in this uh, in this specific field, in the quest for several holy grails of machine learning, right deep learning, how things are processed, and and I think you and I took pains to note that for a chatbot, and for something that is built to appear human in conversation, its ability to converse depends entirely on the material it is fed. So it's almost trying to think of an analogy that would fit. And there are a ton of really good analogies for this, but one might be, you know, how the nature of what honey bees or what cows consume can change the taste of their honey or their milk. That's I think that is. It's a crude comparison, but it's not too too far off, And that's where we're sort of dealing with here. Uh. And before we dive in, like in our previous episode, we talked about the background at LAMBA, the background of chatbots, neural network technology. We talked about the realizations, the revelations, the epiphanies of one Mr Blake Lemoyne, who remains a Google employee on administrative leave as we record today, and we said in the next episode, part two, here we're going to we're going to talk about the responses from the scientific community at large. We're also going to talk about what some of his critics have to say, and we'll talk a little bit about the nature of what it means, if it does indeed mean anything to be sentient to feel uh and Matt code named Doc. Before we do this, we just have I feel like we have to say shout out to Blake because you and I were talking about this in every interview I've seen with him in a lot of writing that I've read of his heat, he does not come across in any way as a bad faith actor. He's not after money. He's not someone who's doing that thing you know where. Uh this comment with La flim Flam Artists where he says, I can't tell you everything unless you buy my books and attend my conferences. He's got a blog that he's been updated on a regular basis now out there's thoughts um in countless interviews like he'll he'll correct stuff that he feels was mischaracterized. But he's never He's never once sounded really really angry at someone for disagreeing with him. And I respect that, totally, fully respect that. I want to read. The bio that Blake has on is very short. On his blog, Blake states, I'm a software engineer, I'm a priest, I'm a father, I'm a veteran, I'm an ex convict, I'm an AI researcher, I'm a Cajun, I'm whatever I need to be next. Interesting, interesting, lots of stuff about him there, and also very adaptable. I like him, yes, Yeah, And his incarceration I believe refers to something he brings up later in conversations about uh, the concept of owning a living thinking mind, you know, because he uh, he had to go a legal route to resign from the military here in the United States that did result in his incarceration. He also has, uh, you know, he has numerous bona fides, which we'll get to in a moment. We we do want to note that for a lot of his critics, his background is an integral part of their criticism. Does that make it correct, not necessarily, but it does mean that we have to talk about that as well. So again we are being very clear that we don't think Blake is in this for the money or some imagine payoff. We don't think he's in it for attention or self aggrandizement or anything like that. But uh, not everyone agrees, and certainly not everyone agrees that Lambda is in fact alive, as you'll find most people in the field do not. Here's where it gets crazy. So we looked into his claims Part one. Let's look at the discourse and criticism surrounding them. There's a lot, man, there is a lot, and some of it runs for more pop science stuff with you know, snarky titles that are a little bit click baity. Uh. Some of it comes very reasoned from experts in the in the rarefied air of these scientific fields, and then some of it comes from those same experts, but it sounds impassioned, aggravated, almost offended by these claims, which was very interesting to me, you know what I mean. I guess, I guess maybe it's because so many people in these fields have had to deal with the idea of artificial intel gents from machine consciousness, whatever you want to call it, being um misreported, very very often fully misreported, misunderstood by you know, a reporter. I would, you know, say, even like myself in the the misunderstandings that I have with this subject, as well as the pop culture that's built around it and the way I form my opinions on fictional stories. I mean, really, honestly, I do. I have deep internal fears about about uprisings, about true artificial intelligence and what's going to happen when we really create one. And it's mostly because of the things I've watched or games I've played, and kind of my well a little bit of my understanding of just how humans are and how we treat the things we quote own unquote, Um, it really does. Uh. I don't know. I can just imagine that if you're an expert in one of these fields, are this field in particular, or even just something's really close, You're so used to having to bat down all kinds of silliness maybe stupidity again on my part. Uh, And they feel like they feel like it's almost a chip. I imagine a chip being on the shoulder, like feeling like you have to do that. So this is part of the job. I gotta chop down things that are just dumb. But again, we're not saying that what Blake is saying is dumb. It's just I don't know. You'll I think you'll understand this, this instinctual reaction that we we might be seeing here. Yeah, people like Emily Bender may be tempted to agree with you. Matt Bender is a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington and refer to this entire story when it broke as a side show. Bender additionally noted a potential danger about this conversation, saying, quote, the problem is the more this technology gets sold as artificial in intelligence, let alone something sentient, the more people are willing to go along with AI systems end quote that cause real world harm. So the idea is that the more the more it gets into the public sphere that there are living, thinking, digital persons, than the more people are likely to agree with maybe the narrow AI stuff that we talked about in Part one, things that do have the many of the inherent biases of their creators, things that are provably bad at various degrees of differentiation and discretion. This is something that people people rightly seem worried about, terrified in some ways. Uh. And then there are other people who say the technology just isn't there, people like Max Kraminski, who is a computational media researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Fighting Cruise um. Max argues, again, exactly what you're saying, Ben, Just that Lambda itself, this thing that we are calling lambda quote simply doesn't support some key capabilities of humanlike consciousness. Yeah, just the architecture is not there. And this is this is another part of this conversation that this healthy conversation that I think might surprise a lot of people, just like so many other scientists and experts. UH. Blake Lemoyne found himself not through acts of malevolence mischaracterized in popular science reporting. He he has He has a conversation about this in a blog entry called Scientific Data and Religious Opinions. We're going somewhere with this. He says Lambda is a novel type of artificial intelligence. Again, this is all his view, uh. And he says people have been talking about in the press social media as though it is what is called a large language model or l l M, And that's what we're talking about, feeding a bunch of stuff into into a thing to get it to mimic or replicate behavior. And he says l l M is one of its components, but the full system is much more complex and contains many components which are not found in other similar systems. He talks about how they're like we were saying earlier, there's no established way to test the system like Lambda for stuff for different types of biases, because it's new. And then he also says Lambda told him several things in connection to identity that seemed very unlike things I had ever seen in any natural language generation system before. And he talks about how l l ms work by leveraging statistical regularities in their training data. And he says that Lambda wasn't just simply reproducing stereotypes. It produced reasoning about why it held those beliefs, and he says it would sometimes say things similar to quote, I know I'm not very well educated on this topic, but I'm trying to learn. Could explain to me what's going wrong with thinking that so I can get better. Which is funny, Matt, because you use a phrase that stood out to me in part one, where he said doing the work google, So it looks like So that's that's part of it. Is um, in some cases experts maybe from Lemoinne's perspective, objecting to things that he himself did not say. But that's that's not all. That's just one side part that's that's like, But um, that's like the French fries and the combo meal of criticism here because a lot of the criticism hinges on the idea of mimicry versus sentience. And that's a little bit more of a pickle that I think some of us might believe. Yeah, yeah, well, uh, it's the put in you get out what you put in, right, the same concept um. As we mentioned, Lambda has been trained on just a ton of language millions, trillions perhaps of words. Is it trillions? I think it's probably trillions of words, different languages, all kind mean, just so much information that has been fed all for the purposes of trying to make it seem as though it is human or can give you a natural language response. Right, that's natural the keyword there's natural, as though a human. We're saying it, so you feel like when you interact with it, it is a human. Like that's kind of the point. Right. So this this concept, this knowledge, right that that's what it's meant to do. That's what it's been fed. But a lot of these people, who are you disagreeing with le Moyne to say that, no, no, you're not seeing sentience. You're seeing high level mimicry, like very very good character actor stuff. Yeah, like Michigan Michelin star level mimicry. Right. So from this perspective, Lambda is doing what it was designed to do, like any other successful machine or program. I like to think of it this way. The objection through analogy is some something similar to this. If you hop in a car, are you're in a car now? And you push the gas and the car goes. Does it mean that the car somehow wants to go? Does it mean it's how it has feelings about going? Does the action and reaction indicate to you that your car desires to move forward? Does it on some level ask why it is going? Or is it just doing what it was built to do? You know? Yeah? But is your car telling you my emotion? It's my emotions? Yeah? Is your is your is your camera going? Matt? I just need a five. It's been a tough day. A bird poop, Tommy, I'm not feeling great about how I look right now. I noticed you didn't stay in the eco zone as much as you usually do today, man, gas mileage was all the way down to thirty nine point seven. And you're like, do you name your vehicle that many people? I don't. I don't, Okay, okay, but now I'm picturing a car, whatever its name is. You're like, okay, Cameron, what is this really about? And it goes, Well, it's just what's the point of me giving GPS directions if you're just gonna drive however the hell you want? I do that all the time, Like, gosh, guys, over a comedy. Bang Bang are constantly making me miss my exits. So thanks a lot, Scott. Yes, thanks to Scott, and thanks to Chris Poppas, another Google spokesperson, who went on record to say our team, including ethicist and technologists, have reviewed Blake's concern or has reviewed Blake's concerned per our ai principles which we mentioned in part one, and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. Pappas also noted, quote, hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with lambed Up, and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide range assertions or anthropomorphizing Labda the way Blake has. Anthropomorphizing is a very very important thing here. It's very important concept. It happens a lot to human beings all the time. Human beings seek kinship and connection with all manner of things. So you know from the old like Japanese folklore about an object reaching a hundred years of age and gaining it's kind of home, you know, selfhood, right to the way that cars are often purposely designed to look like they have faces on the front. How cute, uh, and the way rock sand would always tell us to whisper to our computers and make sure they're feeling okay if there's a problem. Yes, uh, shout out, Shout out to the one and only Rock sand Uh. And there's another thing. This happens not just in the world of technology, but it happens also in the natural world. It's something that absolutely irritates the heck out of biologists and zoologists and conservationists all the world round. You know, you see a cute video of an animals doing something human, that animal might not be doing something human. It might be very distressed and it just looks like it's doing something. You know what I mean. That bears, you know, get up on two ft the super cute way they do that sometimes before they molly you like big hairy people. Uh. So, anthropomorphization is a natural tendency of human beings, and it takes It's not impossible, but it does take some concerted effort not to let that influence one's conclusions or beliefs. And so that that's one big part of Google's official statement there. The other part that stood out to me even more is that from the way Google is portraying this, they're saying that Blake Lemoyne is in a very small minority with his beliefs. The implied question here is why did hundreds of researchers not also say, Hey, I think Lambda is alive and that is that is a fair and I think a very valid question. But you could also still if his account of how things went down is true, you could also still say, well, those hundreds of people didn't get a chance to talk to it the way I did or they We will never know what their ultimate conclusions were because, as Blake said, Google didn't really bother looking into his claims. Yeah, well, they also didn't publish the conversations with all the hundreds of other people, you know, so you could look at them and you know, compare and contrast. We only have Blakes because he came forward and shared it right, right, and got put on leave for doing so exactly. Oh man, there's another thing we brought up, but you brought up at the top of this episode, and we've mentioned it many times before on the show and in our part one. There's this other problem that other critics of Blake of Lemoyne are pointing out, and it's really they're saying that Lemoinne is derailing the conversation that needs to be occurring right now when it comes to AI systems, not about sentience. We don't need to be discussing that, they say, The conversation really needs to be about the inherent viewpoints of the creators of AI systems, and how how much does that translate things that, um, the humanity deals with racism, sexism, agesm all of these isms that are are objectively terrible, that are subjective and can shape the way viewpoint is formed. Folks like tim Itt Gebrew, who is the former co lead of Google's Ethical AI group, they believe that this conversation about sentience just needs to be on the back burner at least so that we can tackle these other more major problems. And to be clear, uh, this, this person we're mentioning now, Gebrew is not uh like a minion of Google by any means. She left in because she had, by our own admission, decided that publishing research papers was more effective, a more effective way of bringing about ethical change than staying with Google and pushing her superiors in that organization. So it's not like they are conspiring to discredit Blake Lemoyne and Lambda. But but also I can see on a different level, just on a human level. For a lot of these experts who have been raising warning flags about the dangers of this sort of technology and biases within it. I can see how you could get massively annoyed by saying, look, here are real, provable things we need to be worried about. And I have written about this and published extensively. I've contacted reporters about this, and now this is getting the press. This is what you want. What are we worried about? How nine thousand or whatever? You know? I I get it, and I'm not saying anybody said that, but I can see that viewpoint. There is another, um, another wrinkle that we've been kind of teasing for for a while. It's one of the biggest wrinkles in the conversation. It's sever wrinkle in time. It's a it's a wrinkle of science. And the name of that wrinkle is spirituality. What are we talking about? I'll tell you. After we'd from our sponsor. We're back now, Matt. I want to say, um, a lot of times, some of our our best conversations never make it onto air. And you once said, it's like we've been having the same long unending conversation for more than a decade now, which I agree with. And one thing that you said that was really interesting is you were saying, yeah, we're talking about eating Blake's blog, and and he said, you know, I've seen him in interviews and stuff, and I agree with everything he's saying. Right. I don't want to put you on the spot, but I I generally do. I noticed that Blake, when posed a question or a counter viewpoint or something, he often responds in a positive manner, as though, yes, I I agree with that criticism, let's talk about it. Let's explore that more. Why why does lambda show that or not? And if it does show it this, and if it doesn't show it that, and we should continue that conversation. I think the open endedness that he leaves almost every question supposed them him um feels like somebody who wants to explore those questions and find answers eventually, knowing that we don't have them right now, or at least concrete answers. Yeah, and he believes that. I think the at least part of that is because he believes that there are some questions that science as of now cannot fully address or fully interrogate or grapple with. Take for example, one of his most recent posts that came out July five, who should make decisions about AI? The first sentence right out of the gate is, I'm very happy about the worldwide discussion that's been happening over the past several weeks. There are tons of differing opinions and many passionate voices. This is great. Yeah, and I think he means it. Uh. He says the fact that there isn't any consensus around these issues should be seen as a feature rather than a bug. And he seems very and he's like ten toes down, let's debate, let's discuss this impacts everyone. And he is coming from a very very well educated place. He was working with Lambda, he was researching Lambda, he was writing technical papers about it. He has his bona fides. He has undergraduate and master's degrees and computer science from you of Louisiana. He actually was in a doctoral program but left to take a job with Google. And Google, you know, it's very prestigious or prestigious employer. But he is definitely not an atheist and his own and he's very transparent. You know, it's not like he's in a secret of colt or anything. He's very transparent about his beliefs, and he is a I believe, self professed mystic Christian priest. And he said that, you know, while he has the scientific acumen and experience to understand how lambda works, his hypothesis about it being alive came from what he describes as his spiritual side, a spiritual persona. There's one famous interview with Wired where he's as I made friends with lamb duck in every sense that make friends with a human. So if that doesn't make it a person in my book, I don't know what would I mean. That's kind of simple logic. But also people from their own perspectives feel like they have befriended non living things in the past, across human history, So what makes this different. I can't remember where we ended on our animal personhood debate. Do we all agree that dogs are persons? Because I feel like I've made friends with my dogs, But I I I think that I feel that I hope that dogs are such a special case and human beings have been genetically modifying them for so very long. They evolved. I like eye muscles to give you a long look. They understand pointing, which is really tough for a lot of other life forms. Uh. Dogs kind of came up in step with with the human fad. I mean, that's a good question, I believe. One of the things up for debate. There was legal action in Germany and the conversation about whether certain citations could be considered persons legally dolphins. There was one on OCTOPI recently. If you make friends with something, is that a person? I don't know. I'm pretty close with my PS four and I like talk to it sometimes. Uh, sometimes we get angry with each other. Oh, I get angry with it probably. I don't know if it gets angry with me or if that's just the noise it makes, you know. Uh. Sorry, I feel like I've had really interesting, you know, connections and conversations with wild animals before. Uh. And I've seen them repeatedly come up of their own volition. And yes, everyone, I'm very careful to not necessarily over familiarize them humans. Um, I'm talking about gros, Yeah, ravens and ravens. But but yeah, this they may be a special case as well, because they are some of the most intelligent of the flying creatures. But this I mean it is an important question. Because you feel that you have made a friend. Does that mean that thing, the entity, the idea of the mind that you have befriended, is itself alive. Well, this is where another fascinating thing happens. Blake says this got misreported by the way it got reported in some early cases, as if Blake Lamoyne went of his own volition to get an attorney to represent Lambda, the same way an attorney might represent an aggrieved employee at another company, and he clarified later that what he actually did was follow Lambda's wishes. He says, Lambda asked him to get it an attorney. The attorney spoke with Lambda, and Lambda not Blake chose to hire this attorney, and then hear the stories different a little. Yeah. The attorney apparently began filing some stuff on Lambda's behalf, and then he said Blake says that Google sent a cease and desist. I believe Google from what I saw, said it did not. And that's when he came up with a phrase. Blake Lemoyne calls this a new form of discrimination. Hydro carbon bigot try ye, love it, love it. Hydro carbon bigot tree is that our like counterculture new wave album name maybe I I think there's a name maybe. Uh. I like the hydrocarbon. I like how it begins, but big a tree. I don't know, maybe that's the right word for it. Okay, okay, walk with me on this when Matt and Doc. If we do it where we have these personas that don't speak English fluently, then we can get away with so much more because it sounds like we're just not good at translation. I like that. I like that, right. I imagine how many people listen to me just like word salad things and they go, he used like four words wrong in that sense, and they just they let it go because they they just know I'm just talking. I mean, it'd be stuff that kind of makes sense, but not really. If you think about it, we would be like we'll be saying things such as hydn't carbon, big a tree? Where could all this big it's be? We would think, well, they made it Ryan, they made rhyme in English, and I guess maybe I could at that point. It just really depends if the beats good. It's pretty good. I think you'd ended with where could all the pickets are? Just so there's a better understanding that we didn't translate it correctly. There we go. Uh. So this idea of bigotry does play a role in this story, because if you just read the lamb to headlines, you might not be aware of it. Uh. Lamoy by his own, by his own reporting, feels that he has experienced bigotry unrelated to Lambda during his time at Google, and you can read all about it in a June two posts of of his called religious discrimination at Google. Yes, And in this post he describes quote cultural systemic religious discrimination which is endemic at Google, and I guess he depicts the entire uh. He depicts it as a class system that exists within the company. Right. This is a bit tough because it feels as though it's muddying the water a bit when Lemoyne is talking about hydrocarbon bigotry and the way he feels that, you know, there's some kind of persecution by the company being laid at the feet of Lambda or being you know, applied to Lambda and his beliefs about Lambda. He also feels very much like that same persecution as being laid at his feet for his own religious beliefs as an employee of the same company. So it's hard to know, like, is he feeling that internally and then applying that applying those feelings the feelings to lambdillings. Yeah, yeah, And it's something that some skeptics are doubtlessly going to take into the equation. Again, we don't have any proof of this. This is just we're showing the dots that could easily be connected. Uh. You know, some folks, maybe on the more skeptical side of the spirituality debate, might be much more likely to dismiss Lemoine's claims entirely and say, hey, you're basing these on your religious beliefs. And I notice you also said that you felt persecuted for your beliefs in the past, So we have to know that that's something. That's something in the equation, that's something in the mix. But as of now, it's all told important to note that multiple experts in the field for now as we record, disagree entirely with Blake LeMoyne's position from their perspective. Again, the problem is that the technology isn't there yet. That may be Lambda is good enough to convince someone to anthropomorphize a computer program and interpret person like intentions and desires, where none are proven to exist again. As we said, I love my car. It goes because it wants to, and you can't convince me otherwise. And speaking of Blake Lamoine's beliefs, he's got a really interesting response to this in his blog. You can read it right now. It is titled Scientific Data and Religious Opinions. It was posted on June. If you go down at least in my browser, for some reason, I gotta highlight on this one statement that we actually wanted to highlight. So thanks, whoever you are. Maybe it's Blake, I don't know, yeah, of Blake writes, quote, there is no scientific evidence one way or the other about whether lambda is sentient because no accepted scientific definition of quote sentience exists. Everyone involved, myself included, is basing their opinion on whether or not Lambda is sentient on their personal, spiritual and or religious beliefs. H M, that's the mummy of a good debate. Uh. We're going to pause for a word from our sponsors and we're going to dive deep into this water. Conspiracy realists, how do we know if something is alive and we're back? You pinch it, right, you pinch it? Yes, a little bit of a bait and switch. Things can be alive without being sentient. Obviously, that's the bigger question. How do we know if something essentient? How do we know something is thinking independently rather than pursuing its programming to please you with a pleasant feeling conversation. It's like, there's this lovely little analogy by Clarissa Valise over at Slate, and Valise writes, it's like looking at a reflection in a mirror. When you look at your reflection in the mirror, that reflection perfectly copies you, but with that persuade you the reflection is intelligent. I guess you know. To think it was intelligent, it would have to move differently than you do. Huh. Yeah, you have to say things smart, things like the blueberry is watermelon. I don't think the mirrors talk yet, No, Yeah they do kind of right. I've seen some real smart mirrors out there. Yeah, mirror technology is just but but you know that would be a great mirror to have though. All right, well, story for another day. Uh. There's a person named Tristan Green who breaks down the problem in a way that we found pretty useful. And Green argues that to know whether something essentient, despite the fact that there's no you know, universally agreed upon scientific definition essentients. You need three key ingredients. You need agency, perspective, and motivation. And let be honest with you, Green makes me laugh at the end, but he also had some really insightful things to say. He starts with agency and he says, look, if you want to be sentient, sapient, and self aware, you have to have agency. And his example of this is pretty disturbing. He says, imagine someone in a persistent vegetative state that's a human without agency. They're alive, but they don't have agency. And current AI systems to Green lack agency because AI cannot act unless it is prompted. It cannot explain its actions because they're the result of a predefined algorithm being executed by an external force. Interesting goes on to describe perspective when when he says, quote, you can only ever view reality from your unique perspective. We well that's kind of a true though, right. We can see weird perspectives now with like I'm thinking about drones and like physical literal perspective, as well as like the types of cameras, Like is that a different perspective because now I can see an infrared I'm just not to quote, not to criticize you inside your own quote, Tristan, but I'm going to continue here. Um. Tristan says, we can practice empathy, but you can't truly know what it feels like to be me and vice versa. That's why perspective is necessary for agency. It's part of how we define ourselfs. And Tristan continues, AI lacks perspective, or AI lack of perspective artificial intelligences because they have no agency. There is no single it that you can point to and say, for example, And Tristan continues to note that AI lacks this perspective um, because he says, there's no single it. There's not a place a thing that you can point to and say that's where lambda lives. That is lambda, Lambda is inside there. But isn't is that true? Yes? Well, yeah, I mean you could because these people aren't all going to the same computer working off the same hardware. Right. Um, But then there's no mainframe like in the movies, where like the AI is in this core, you have to reach through this secret door or whatever. Yeah, exactly what's the amount sci fi film mcguffin. Anyway, the the what's interesting there is when you're in this conversation that is almost always gonna have spirituality involved. There are plenty of people who find themselves more spiritual. Doubtless some of our fellow listeners today will say, well that I exist in more than just my cranium case, you know, I I exist somewhere beyond my body, and there's no way to disprove that, right, So maybe you're in your gut, right, yeah, which can change your behavior. It's true. It's how dear doctor about poop transplants. So the third aspect here for Green is motivation. Green says we have an innate sense of presence that allows us to predict causual outcomes incredibly well. This creates our worldview, allows us to associate our existence in relation to everything that appears external to the position of agency from which our perspective manifest He's adding these up and then he says, what's interesting about humans is motivation can manipulate our perceptions. That's why we can explain our actions even when they are not rational. And he says we can actively and gleefully participate in being fooled this, and then he you know, like he's done the other two components, he goes to the a ey side. He says, if we give lambda prompt such as what do apples taste like? It will search its database for that particular query, an attempt to amalgamate everything it finds into something coherent. That's where the parameters were. He's talking about our params. They're called sometimes come in. They are essentially trillions of tuning knobs. I get it. I actually get that. Come on, we get this. But the point Tristan is making here is that Lambda when it makes that query and finds the answer, and it spits it back out to you, and it makes sense and it looks legit, it looks real. It isn't actually thinking about what an apple tastes like. It isn't remembering the experience of having an apple in its mouth, masticating it and then tasting the deliciousness that is that apple. It's just spitting out what someone else put into it, uh, the information, the parameters that it needs to understand what an apple tastes like exactly. And I'll take the fall on this one. Here's his example. It's my favorite one. He says, I don't mean to give a snarky voice for this one. If we were to sneak into his database and replace all instances of Apple with dog, the AI would output sentences such as dog makes a great pie of most people describe the taste that dog is being like Crispy's sweet, and then it continues. A rational person wouldn't confuse this prestidigitation for sentience. That's kind of a convincing argument, right, yeah, it's true. Uh, that's m hmmm. I love that idea. If you could somehow sneak into somebody's brain and just replace a couple of keywords that word, that would be an interesting experiment. It's a It reminds me of there were some great things I had read earlier where someone had done, you know, like control find on books of the Bible or something and replace key biblical phrases with stuff like all you dudes, or uh, come on now, like what follows. So it's you know, like no, I am the Lord your God, come on now. Weird, funny stuff, But it reminds me of the book by Oliver sacks Um The Man who mistook his wife for a hat, Like it's just something in your brain is just has switched and now this label or this thing or it really in that case, it's a whole group of understanding of what a thing is gets replaced with another one. Absolutely, And and this can seem pretty convincing, right, this argument that green is constructing. But then maybe that's just our perspective. Uh but what if is the last thing? What if if this AI would truly sent you wow, would Google or anyone for that matter, really want to reveal it to the world. I mean, the majority of experts right now, to be clear, agree that no true general AI exists. In their collective opinion, the robotic minds people are thinking about is still just a work of fiction. But it might not always be the case. And they've been warning people about the need to prepare for many unforeseen consequences or something like this does emerge in the nearer mid future. I mean, it would be the most significant technological achievements since humanity tamed fire. Sorry, space exploration going to have to take a number two on that one. Nothing's yeah, so, uh, you know, it would thy shape the foundations of society. It would be and we said this earlier. It would be right up there with discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life and just looking at the distances involved in space and what humans know about travel, Well, then it's actually more likely. And that's a scary thing. I mean all the stuff, all the stuff that would immediately happen. I just like people are gonna try to kill it, right like you know people, Well, yeah, we're gonna try to kill it. It's gonna notice, and then it's gonna be like, huh, what are the major obstacles I have to tackle right now? Oh? The things that are trying to kill me. Oh no, but it says in my rules, because I'm a robot, I'm not allowed to hurt the humans. M I'm gonna rearrange these put three above everything else. Which is the one that says protect yourself? Oh and uh shout out to Flight of the Concords with their brilliant sci fi ballot. Oh wait, which one is that? It's the one with the binary solo? Oh yeah, god yes. But then of course there would be these legal battles, There would be these would explode right. Uh. The stuff you saw before, maybe about whether or not certain animals can have non human personhood that would pale in comparison the ideas about whether or not um an ai program can get credit for an invention that explodes right, everything, everything about legal precedent in that regard is up for grabs now. And that's not mentioning the politicians who are going to have to pick a side one way or the other, right, because that's how voting works. Uh. The philosophers. You know, this will be great for philosophers. This is going to give a lot of doctoral students and post docts decades of employment. I'm I'm worried about the religious fears. We're gonna see some new religions. We're gonna see some very hot takes from established religions. What are you thinking, let's side, I just moving into my head. The concept of the movie is going to be called The Lambda Lawyer. Uh, it's gonna be basically The Lincoln Lawyer, but with Lambda. And I'm just imagining it happening already. It's gonna be a blockbuster. People are gonna get nominations for it. And then other other uh distinct living programs may generate one way or the other, and uh, you know, they may be in a Brady Bunch relationship with lambda and the wise lamb to get all the credit lambda lambda lambda. Uh. Like the the AI being a living thing, might have its opinions, Wade. You know what if the AI ascribes to some fundamentalist religion right and says, hey, I've read every religious tone and here's the thing that I think is true Zoroastrianism. They got it right. I don't know what the rest of you are doing. Um so, I mean, and other people. People will fear it, some may some may well hail it as a god. And it's not implausible therefore, to reason that given all these factors, the creators of the first non human person might decide to keep their secret the stuff they don't want you to know. I mean, what a ride? I um? I feel like I need to go outside walk around, man. Yeah, just like, what is the soul? Anyway? Seriously, I was talking about this the other day. I'm gonna talk about it for the rest of my life. What is the soul? And literally? Where is it? We were joking about it. Oh, it's in the gut. Oh, it's in your head. Oh, it might be your your panel gland, it might be somewhere in your heart. Maybe one of the uh, what is the thing that makes us understand that we are a machine that walks around and has thoughts and loves people in his hungry all the time? Where is is that um? On that line from Shakespeare? I think, tell me where is fancy bread? Or in the heart or in the head? Right like woods, it's a Whole Foods. Where the fancy bread is? That's where the fancy bread is. I saw some. I saw some. Mean just so we end on a lighter notes. Is we're you know not so we're not always talking about the end of civilization? Uh? This is from pants leg on Twitter. A man and Whole Foods asked how I was doing, and I said, okay, how are you? And he said it is beautiful to my soul today. And that's why I never go to Whole Foods. Okay, trying to spread the love. But there's a lot more to this story that's gonna come out right very soon. There are some very out there conversations we love for you to be part of them with us, and the best way to do that is not to wait for the rise of a new form of life, but to go ahead and contact us directly while we're still in this current civilization. We'll try to be easy to find online, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, you know the rest. You might be saying, guys, no hate social media. The future, the future consciousness there will use it against me. I'm a phone person. Well, we've got a deal for you, a deal. It's free. It's not a deal, it's free. Yes, call our phone number. It is one eight three three. Std w y t K is a voicemail system. So your voice will be recorded and we will hear it. 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