As someone who grew up on sci fi, the idea of sentient artificial intelligence (AI) has always seemed inevitable. But now that LaMDA — the Google AI chatbot currently making headlines — is showing signs of intelligence and self-awareness, well, it actually feels sadder than I ever imagined. Is Google raising robots on a steady diet of Sartre and The Cure or what? I asked a psychologist to help me figure out how to think about this existentially-challenged chatbot.
In case you missed the whole debacle, an engineer at Google was recently suspended for claiming that an AI chatbot he was working on had become sentient, The New York Times reported. Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google’s Responsible A.I. organization, told The Times that he was put on paid leave for violating the company’s confidentiality policy.
