ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH TEXTS – EXAM, 20 June 2022

NAME:____________ GRADE:________
Read the text carefully and write a 180-220-word summary of it.

Artificial Consciousness Is Boring

By Stephen Marche
JUNE 19, 2022, The Atlantic

Last week, Google put one of its engineers on administrative leave after
he claimed to have encountered machine sentience on a dialogue agent
named LaMDA. Because machine sentience is a staple of the movies, and
because the dream of artificial personhood is as old as science itself, the
story went viral, gathering far more attention than pretty much any story
about natural-language processing (NLP) has ever received. That’s a
shame. The notion that LaMDA is sentient is nonsense: LaMDA is no
more conscious than a pocket calculator. More importantly, the silly
fantasy of machine sentience has once again been allowed to dominate
the artificial-intelligence conversation when much stranger and richer,
and more potentially dangerous and beautiful, developments are under
way.
Already, models exist that are far more powerful and mystifying than
LaMDA. LaMDA operates on up to 137 billion parameters, which are,
speaking broadly, the patterns in language that a transformer-based NLP
uses to create meaningful text prediction. Recently I spoke with the
engineers who worked on Google’s latest language model, PaLM, which
has 540 billion parameters and is capable of hundreds of separate tasks
without being specifically trained to do them. It is a true artificial general
intelligence, insofar as it can apply itself to different intellectual tasks
without specific training, “out of the box” as it were.
Some of these tasks are obviously useful and potentially transformative.
According to the engineers—and, to be clear, I did not see PaLM in
action myself, because it is not a product—if you ask it a question in
Bengali, it can answer in both Bengali and English. If you ask it to
translate a piece of code from C to Python, it can do so. It can summarize
text. It can explain jokes. Then there’s the function that has startled its
own developers, and which requires a certain distance and intellectual
coolness not to freak out over. PaLM can reason. Or, to be more precise
—and precision very much matters here—PaLM can perform reason.
None of this has anything to do with artificial consciousness, of course. “I
don’t anthropomorphize,” Chowdhery, a member of the PaLM team who
is as close as any engineer to understanding PaLM, said bluntly. “We are
simply predicting language.” Artificial consciousness is a remote dream
that remains firmly entrenched in science fiction, because we have no
idea what human consciousness is; there is no functioning falsifiable
thesis of consciousness, just a bunch of vague notions. And if there is no
way to test for consciousness, there is no way to program it. You can only
ask an algorithm to do what you tell it to do. All that we can come up
with to compare machines to humans are little games, such as Turing’s
imitation game, that ultimately prove nothing.
Where we’ve arrived instead is somewhere more foreign than artificial
consciousness. In a strange way, a program like PaLM would be easier to
comprehend if it simply were sentient. We at least know what the
experience of consciousness entails. All of PaLM’s functions that I’ve
described so far come from nothing more than text prediction. What
word makes sense next? That’s it. That’s all. Why would that function
result in such enormous leaps in the capacity to make meaning? This
technology works by substrata that underlie not just all language but all
meaning (or is there a difference?), and these substrata are
fundamentally mysterious. PaLM may possess modalities that transcend
our understanding. What does PaLM understand that we don’t know
how to ask it?
Using a word like understand is fraught at this juncture. One problem in
grappling with the reality of natural-language processing is the AI-hype
machine, which, like everything in Silicon Valley, oversells itself. Google,
in its promotional materials, claims that PaLM demonstrates
“impressive natural language understanding.” But what does the word
understanding mean in this context? I am of two minds myself: On the
one hand, PaLM and other large language models are capable of
understanding in the sense that if you tell them something, its meaning
registers. On the other hand, this is nothing at all like human
understanding. “I find our language is not good at expressing these
things,” Zoubin Ghahramani, the vice president of research at Google,
acknowledges. “We have words for mapping meaning between sentences
and objects, and the words that we use are words like understanding.
The problem is that, in a narrow sense, you could say these systems
understand just like a calculator understands addition, and in a deeper
sense they don’t understand. We have to take these words with a grain of
salt.” Needless to say, Twitter conversations and the viral information
network in general are not particularly good at taking things with a grain
of salt.
Ghahramani is enthusiastic about the unsettling unknown of all of this.
He has been working in artificial intelligence for 30 years, but told me
that right now is “the most exciting time to be in the field” exactly
because of “the rate at which we are surprised by the technology.” He
sees huge potential for AI as a tool in use cases where humans are
frankly very bad at things but computers and AI systems are very good at
them. “We tend to think about intelligence in a very human-centric way,
and that leads us to all sorts of problems,” Ghahramani said. “One is that
we anthropomporphize technologies that are dumb statistical-pattern
matchers. Another problem is we gravitate towards trying to mimic
human abilities rather than complementing human abilities.” Humans
are not built to find the meaning in genomic sequences, for example, but
large language models may be. Large language models can find meaning
in places where we can find only chaos.
Even so, enormous social and political dangers are at play here,
alongside still hard-to-fathom possibilities for beauty. Large language
models do not produce consciousness but they do produce convincing
imitations of consciousness, which are only going to improve drastically,
and will continue to confuse people. When even a Google engineer can’t
tell the difference between a dialogue agent and a real person, what hope
is there going to be when this stuff reaches the general public? Unlike
machine sentience, these questions are real. Answering them will require
unprecedented collaboration between humanists and technologists. The
very nature of meaning is at stake.
So, no, Google does not have an artificial consciousness. Instead, it is
building enormously powerful large language systems with the ultimate
goal, as Narang says, “to enable one model that can generalize across
millions of tasks and ingest data across multiple modalities.” Frankly, it’s
enough to worry about without the science-fiction robots playing on the
screens in our heads. Google has no plans to turn PaLM into a product.
“We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves in terms of the capabilities,”
Ghahramani said. “We need to approach all of this technology in a
cautious and skeptical way.” Artificial intelligence, particularly the AI
derived from deep learning, tends to rise rapidly through periods of
shocking development, and then stall out. (See self-driving cars, medical
imaging, etc.) When the leaps come, though, they come hard and fast
and in unexpected ways. Gharamani told me that we need to achieve
these leaps safely. He’s right. We’re talking about a generalized-meaning
machine here: It would be good to be careful.
The fantasy of sentience through artificial intelligence is not just wrong;
it’s boring. It’s the dream of innovation by way of received ideas, the
future for people whose minds never escaped the spell of 1930s science-
fiction serials. The questions forced on us by the latest AI technology are
the most profound and the most simple; they are questions that, as ever,
we are completely unprepared to face. I worry that human beings may
simply not have the intelligence to deal with the fallout from artificial
intelligence. The line between our language and the language of the
machines is blurring, and our capacity to understand the distinction is
dissolving inside the blur.