Chatbots are not sentient and the Turing test is obsolete

But future computers based on new physics will be sentient.

Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!

Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:

You are invited to attend the Terasem Space Day Colloquium on July 20, from 10am ET to 1pm ET, via Zoom.

Giulio Prisco @giulioprisco

Mark your calendar! Terasem Space Day Colloquium, July 20, 2022. Cultural, philosophical and spiritual aspects of spaceflight. Rick Tumlinson, Riccardo Campa, Elaine Walker, Frank White, Frank Tipler.

turingchurch.netTerasem Space Day Colloquium, July 20, 2022Cultural, philosophical and spiritual aspects of spaceflight. Rick Tumlinson, Riccardo Campa, Elaine Walker, Frank White, Frank Tipler.

I look forward to seeing you on July 20 at the Terasem Space Day! See previous newsletters for more info about the speakers.

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My friend Nupur Munshi has rescued from internet oblivion and improved our 2015 review of “Demystifying the Akasha: Consciousness and the Quantum Vacuum,” by Ralph Abraham and Sisir Roy. I have also added some thoughts. Here’s the edited and republished review.

Excerpts:

“Perhaps everything that ever happens, including our thoughts and memories, is stored in permanent ‘Akashic records,’ a cosmic memory field hidden in yet unknown aspects of reality…

“Abraham and Roy build… a ‘pre-geometry’ of dynamic cellular networks… beyond space-time, and from which the geometry of space-time is derived. The pre-geometry ‘contains all times’ and fluctuates in an internal time-like dimension, not to be confused with ordinary time. Ordinary space and time emerge from pre-geometry…

future scientists could resurrect the dead by solving the engineering problem of how to read the Akashic records…

This very document is a conceptual example: the original version of the document disappeared from the internet when I repurposed the domain turingchurch.com. But the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive had an ‘akashic’ backup copy, from which we retrieved the document, which is now live here in an improved version.”

See my book “Tales of the Turing Church” for more.

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OK, let’s come to the main topic.

Picture from Wikimedia Commons.

Giulio Prisco @giulioprisco

I think the #LaMDA story definitely indicates that considering the Turing test an indicator of sentience is obsolete. Very soon chatbots will routinely pass the Turing test. And arguably LaMDA already does.

thrivous.comWhat Is Sentient AI, and Has Google Built One? | Thrivous®I’m sure many readers have seen news headlines reporting that Google may have built a sentient Artificial Intelligence (AI). This story may at first seem far from the life science news usually covered at Thrivous. But I don’t think it is that far. In fact, the debate on whether an AI could qualify a…

I’m sure you have been reading and thinking about the claim that Google’s chatbot LaMDA is sentient. In my last Pulse column (hosted by Thrivous, a nootropic company co-founded by my good friend Lincoln Cannon) I give background information and offer some thoughts.