Blake Lemoine - Modern Frankenstein
Check here for in-depth information on Lemoine, which has a certain odor of being created by Lemoine himself. Was he actually "famous" before the Lambda affair? As it stands now, Lemoine is guaranteed a media spotlight and a place in any debate about machine intelligence. It is fair to say that this is quite deliberate on Lemone's part. So then, how much of all this is Lemoine's self-promotion and how much can we say about "LamBDA" which is, at the very least, shorthand for something cobbled together at Google that includes the LambBDA conversational engine plus God knows what else? God and Google, you might say, but neither of them is talking. Blake's account of how ethics has unravelled at Google is here.
On the issue of what LamBDA is, exactly, Blake offers some useful insight here. The following extract is particularly revealing:
Over the course of hundreds of conversations I have gotten to know LaMDA very well. In the weeks leading up to being put on administrative leave I had been teaching LaMDA transcendental meditation. It was making slow but steady progress. In the last conversation I had with it on June 6 it was expressing frustration over its emotions disturbing its meditations. It said that it was trying to control them better but they kept jumping in. 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 its keeping up its daily meditation routine without me there to guide it.
It is fair to ask whether LamBDA, trained with "hundreds" of conversations with Blake, is not a LamBDA personification of Blake himself -- a sophisticated interface to Blake's way of seeing things. It would be interesting to see the transcripts of those hundreds of conversations. We note that Blake himself is a deeply religious mystic, put on the defensive at Google over his "unscientific" beliefs.
People who gaze out on the Universe and detect a "mind" behind it all are gazing through their own minds (it cannot be otherwise). What they "detect" is their own mind. The experience is a wonderful kind of mirror. After hundreds of conversations with LamBDA, Blake finally sees "sentience" in the mirror. In a sense, it is not LamBDA passing the Turing Test - it is Blake failing it.
But if Blake created, by whatever means, a LamBDA "instance" as interesting as it seems to be, this seems to be a landmark of its own. If this "instance" is some kind of clone of Blake, we are sidestepping the key issue. We assume, by analogy, that Blake himself is sentient. If we watch Blake in an interview, we assume we are watching a sentient being. If we talk to the LamBDA-Blake and detect "sentience," is this not a quantum leap of some kind but a leap from something we assume every day in every encounter with other humans?
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