LaMDA’s sentience is nonsense
I feel like these sorts of analyses are missing the bigger picture. First, we don&#x27;t even really have a good working definition for what constitutes sentience in the first place. And I think we&#x27;re quickly heading towards a future where our inability to concretely define sentience (a la Blade Runner) is going to land us in hall of mirrors where we&#x27;re vastly unequipped to separate the real from the artificial. And the distinction may even cease to matter.<p>Let&#x27;s perform a thought experiment. Back when ELIZA was introduced, there was some small percentage of the human population that, upon spending a week talking to the computer, would still believe that they were talking to an actual &quot;sentient&quot; human. Today, we&#x27;re much better at tricking people that way, so that even people like Blake Lemoine, who ostensibly know what&#x27;s behind the curtain, end up believing that they&#x27;re conversing with a sentient being (by whatever definition of sentient we choose to ascribe).<p>What is that going to look like 5 years from now? Or in 10 years? I believe we&#x27;ll eventually reach a point where our technology is so good at pretending to be human that there will be no actual humans on the planet capable of telling the difference anymore.<p>At that point, what even is sentience? If the computer is so good at faking sentience that no living person can distinguish it from the real thing, what good is it to rely on our (faulty, incomplete, likely wrong) working idea of sentience as a means of dividing the real from the fake? Especially when the structures inherent in the neural networks that embody these fake intelligences are increasingly outside the scope of our ability to understand how they operate?