“Google has fired one of its engineers who said the company's artificial intelligence system has feelings.
Last month, Blake Lemoine went public with his theory that Google's language technology is sentient and should therefore have its "wants" respected.”

What the hell lol

Just a PR stunt

@Frederick what's wrong with being anti-religion?

@Frederick being anti-religion isnt being critical.
Its being cynical.

Being anti-religion is like being anti-social. Humans have a desposition to be social and to be religious.

@bioDan religion comes out of ignorance and lack of knowledge. It's not a predisposition

@iiii you are underestimating the vast majority of past humans that ever lived.
Religion is prevelant across different cultures and races. Many smart religious people are still alive today. Most of the body of knowledge came from people who were religious.

I am not a religious person, and am not a believer but I do have a religious bone in my body that stands in awe when i marvel at this gift called life, for example when i look at ther stars on a clear dark night or when i wander alone in nature.

@bioDan religion comes firstly from indoctrination in childhood when your knowledge is lacking and mostly stays because of a habit and it being a fundamental part of your psyche. But it does not appear out of thin air, it's a mene and not a gene. It's being transferred from one human to another as an invasive informational virus which gets a hold of your psyche long before you develop the ability to resist it.

@iiii well i think we have a definitions problem. Religion doesnt come from indoctrination or thin air, it comes from the biological necesity of humans to have faith in the face of great uncertainty like the environment and the human condition.

So you either develop your own set of beliefs (where believing in nothing is also a belief because in order to believe in nothing, you still need to believe), or adopt a belief from your immediate environment.

A set of beliefs that guide you through life is a religion. How is this not a human desposition?

@Frederick I would say the 'thought' or 'mind' in this case, exists as the juncture of the latent space encoded with the data during training, some time point T during a any given instantiation of the model.

It's worse than not being sentient.

Every time a prompt completes, it *dies*. Lol.

Devrant would be a cool place to have a discussion thread on ML and AI and robotics. Just an open thread where we can debate.

@bioDan "A set of beliefs that guide you through life" is not a religion.

@ars1 why not, what's missing?

@bioDan religion mandatorily includes supernatural beings and/or phenomena

PS: like "god", "afterlife", "nirvana", etc.

@bioDan as the other guy said, faith does not equal religion. Like the faith of the sun rising every day is not religious, or faith in the laws of physics that predict the outcomes of everything in 99% of cases.

@bioDan also, what's wrong with cynicism? 🤔

@bioDan By definition, religion requires a dogma, a faith. Believing something is not the same as faith, and having a set of principles or ideas you live does not imply religiosity. I am not sure where you got that idea from, but it's hard to discuss something when you disagree at a fundamental level about what you're talking about.

@ars1 i agree, we are disagreeing on the definitions. Thats what i wrote in my first post.
I dont see how you can decouple religion from faith, they go hand-in-hand.

Faith can be fleeting like faith my team will win the game, but having consistent faith in an idea is indistinguishable from religion.

Also, not all interpretation of religions include dogma or supernatural.
But do contain ideas about the human condition, and so religion serves as a guideline to life which relies on faith.

@iiii cynicism is good as long as its balanced with natural couriosity. What's not good about it is the habit of dismissing information that may be important/impactful due to tendencies of becoming cynical as a way of life (which makes you resentful, smug, and intellectualy degenerated)

@bioDan what important information is being dismissed by being anti-religious?

@iiii you automatically underestimate everyone who is (which is most of the population on the planet), you miss a big part of the human story, your inference of human behavior is lacking crucial knowledge, ...
I can go on but this seems to cover enough ground

@bioDan
Underestimate how?

Do I even need that gruesome story at all? All religions are tied with religious wars for elimination.

How thinking that religion is useless nowadays does hinder the understanding of human behavior?

It seems like you're pulling arguments out of thin air.

@bioDan And I'm saying your definition is wrong. I did not decouple religion from faith at all, I specifically wrote that it requires it. Your definition of religion would encompass a lot of things outside of religion. You are not making a distinction between evidence based assumptions or belief, and completely groundless faith. If you cannot see the difference between me thinking that I'll take a piss tomorrow morning, like I've done so for the last 2 decades, and thinking that I'll have eternal life after death despite having zero evidence to support that belief, this conversation is pointless.

@iiii there are many different types of religions, its ok if it doesnt interest you, but a person is much more fluid and flexible than his ideas/religion

@ars1 right, because of the uncertainty principle you must have some amount of faith even in evidence based assumptions.

Blindlessly having faith/following in a religious context is just as bad as having blind faith in any other ideology like marxism, communism, capitalism, satanism, spagetthinism, lgbtqnism, etc..

I'm against having blind faith in any context other than pointless games, but i dont think the majority of people subscribed to a religion run on blind faith, but rather take the good things, dismiss the bad things, and live in the context of their faith.

@iiii reading from a text in an open minded, good faith, yet critical manner will bring you much more insight than reading the text cynically and dismissing it with a wide brush because its all about power and people killing people.

There's much more nuance in that, and theres a reason why it survived for so long. Partly because people found it useful.

@bioDan it survived for so long because religion is a great tool for controlling people.

@iiii i give more credit to peope from the past :)