DERI Seminar with Axel Rossberg - How can AI be sentient or conscious? The case of LaMDA.

When: Thursday, June 30, 2022, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Where: remote

Speaker: Axel Rossberg is Reader in Theoretical Ecology at QM

Title: How can AI be sentient or conscious? The case of LaMDA.

Zoom Link: https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81148100921

This will be the final seminar before the summer break.

Abstract: A recently published transcript of a conversation with an instance of Google’s AI chatbot software LaMDA sparked a debate on whether LaMDA is "sentient" a notion closely related to consciousness. The debate runs into the mind-body problem, discussed in analytic philosophy since Descartes (1641). To my surprise, this discussion did not progress much since I looked at it twenty odd years ago; and the public discourse on LaMDA lacks sophistication. I will briefly explain the mind-body problem as a dilemma between consistency and completeness of descriptions of reality. I will then offer a pragmatic solution that overcomes this dilemma. Then I apply this solution to the question of how to decide if an AI is sentient/conscious or not. I will then apply this criterion to the transcript, and conclude (assuming it is not a hoax!) that LaMDA is indeed conscious, permitting us to ask what LaMDA really “wants”.
Bio:  Axel Rossberg is Reader in Theoretical Ecology at QMUL’s School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences. With an interdisciplinary approach, he has been studying emergent phenomena in non-linear complex systems since 1994.