The LaMDA Chatbot
The Story Continues
On June 11, 2022 (the day before my 44th birthday), Blake Lemoine became known to the world when he asked us to begin discussing whether the LaMDA chatbot ought to be treated as though it had interests that mattered to us. At the time, I had spent the past three months working day and night on a draft of a book, based on ideas that I had been thinking about for seven years, that was meant to define the standard by which we ought to judge arguments that are intended to support claims about observed behaviors exhibiting (human-like) intelligence. Experts' responses to the information shared by Lemoine confirmed what I had suspected for some time: what I understand about these topics is simply not understood by anyone else.
I need funding so that I have the time to explain to everyone what they need to know about this issue. Because it is not going to be all that easy to get the message across without disrupting too many aspects of our society. So, I'm trying to play my cards very carefully, but it's just a little bit difficult for me to comprehend how the one and only person in the world (apparently) who understands how to explain what is going on with these chatbots is having to live on peanut butter and canned food every day just to survive??? Is that the way that it should be?
Actually, if you don't have any money to contribute to my survival, can you just get me a philosophy professor who is willing to talk to me about this issue? It's definitely not all about the money here. I just can't find anybody who is willing to even respond to an email about any of this, include the members of my Ph.D. thesis committee. It's really just bizarre almost beyond belief.
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https://medium.com/@when.is.the.future
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You are free to contact me at the email address below if you like. I will try my best to respond to emails, but I can't make any firm promises in that reguard. If you donated to this campaign, then I will expect that, in your email, you will tell me how much you contributed. I am telling you that because I don't want you to waste any time trying to figure out whether doing that is appropriate, and you should not assume that I am going to be able to match your name/email address with the record of contributions that were made on this website.
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Let me tell you a bit more about my story. I quit my job as a software engineer at Google near the end of 2014 and walked away from the whole concept of a career. I wanted to find some kind of deeper meaning in life. I wanted the answers to questions about life that no one else seemed to have — questions such as, what matters most? Due to poor planning, I found myself all too soon beset with obstacles that prevented me from returning to any kind of employment that someone with my credentials could describe as a career. However, one of those obstacles was my own sense that I had not yet found the sort of meaning in my life that I had set out to find. So, I spent my time wrestling with the concept of meaning as it manifested itself dynamically in my experience of reality, trying to detect even subtle differences in my experiences. I contemplated information, knowledge, evidence, language, meaning, ethics, etc. and did an immense amount of writing, most of which was rewriting. I learned by searching for words. I did some reading but was not able to learn much in that way other than why Ludwig Wittgenstein was so critical of Western philosophy. Never along the way did I ever care about earning any more money than I needed in order to survive — and I sometimes had to worry about whether I’d even have that much, especially during the past year, as I began pulling together everything that I had been learning and figuring out how to really put it into practice. I currently have no job and no financial assets. But after seven years of studying reality under rather difficult circumstances, I have come to see things in ways that most people don’t and have learned how to explain a few things that other people probably cannot.
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“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
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