Sentience and Sensibility

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Article from Issue 263/2022
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I feel like we entered a new era earlier this year when Google scientist Blake Lemoine declared that he thought Google's LaMDA artificial intelligence is "sentient," and that the company should probably be asking LaMDA's permission before studying it.

Dear Reader,

I feel like we entered a new era earlier this year when Google scientist Blake Lemoine declared that he thought Google's LaMDA artificial intelligence is "sentient," and that the company should probably be asking LaMDA's permission before studying it. The news this month is that Google fired Lemoine. The stated reason was that he violated a confidentiality agreement, but few observers could separate the termination from Lemoine's announcement and the controversy that followed.

Let me explain, I don't think this story is important because the computer was sentient – in fact, I'm quite sure it wasn't. I just find it strange that we're even talking about it, and the way we're talking about it is even stranger. Several leading computer scientists, and Google as a company, have gone on record stating that the claim was preposterous. The story wasn't much as a computer science event, but as a pop culture phenomenon, it was pure gold. Was this the classic dystopian sci-fi story of a man falling in love with a machine? Or is there a chance that this program is seriously a life form? ("Whoa, kind of makes you think, doesn't it…?")

[...]

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