
Show Notes
Robert Long is a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute. His work is at the intersection of the philosophy of AI Safety and consciousness of AI. We talk about the recent LaMDA controversy, Ilya Sutskever's slightly conscious tweet, the metaphysics and philosophy of consciousness, artificial sentience, and how a future filled with digital minds could get really weird.
Youtube: https://youtu.be/K34AwhoQhb8
Transcript: https://theinsideview.ai/roblong
Host: https://twitter.com/MichaelTrazzi
Robert: https://twitter.com/rgblong
Robert's blog: https://experiencemachines.substack.com
OUTLINE
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:11) The LaMDA Controversy
(00:07:06) Defining AGI And Consciousness
(00:10:30) The Slightly Conscious Tweet
(00:13:16) Could Large Language Models Become Conscious?
(00:18:03) Blake Lemoine Does Not Negotiate With Terrorists
(00:25:58) Could We Actually Test Artificial Consciousness?
(00:29:33) From Metaphysics To Illusionism
(00:35:30) How We Could Decide On The Moral Patienthood Of Language Models
(00:42:00) Predictive Processing, Global Workspace Theories and Integrated Information Theory
(00:49:46) Have You Tried DMT?
(00:51:13) Is Valence Just The Reward in Reinforcement Learning?
(00:54:26) Are Pain And Pleasure Symetrical?
(01:04:25) From Charismatic AI Systems to Artificial Sentience
(01:15:07) Sharing The World With Digital Minds
(01:24:33) Why AI Alignment Is More Pressing Than Artificial Sentience
(01:39:48) Why Moral Personhood Could Require Memory
(01:42:41) Last thoughts And Further Readings
More from The Inside View
Owain Evans is an AI Alignment researcher, research associate at the Center of Human Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, and now leading a new AI safety research group.
This is a special crosspost episode where Adam Gleave is interviewed by Nathan Labenz from the Cognitive Revolution. At the end I also have a discussion with Nathan Labenz about his takes on AI.
Ethan Perez is a Research Scientist at Anthropic, where he leads a team working on developing model organisms of misalignment.
Emil is the co-founder of palette.fm (colorizing B&W pictures with generative AI) and was previously working in deep learning for Google Arts & Culture.
Evan Hubinger leads the Alignment stress-testing at Anthropic and recently published "Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs That Persist Through Safety Training".