Google engineer suspended for saying company AI is a person with thoughts and feelings

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Google engineer suspended for saying company AI is a person with thoughts and feelings
Google's artificial systems are credited for its Pixel smartphone's exceptional photography capabilities, its powerful search engine, its Maps’ Driving Mode estimates, and its voice assistant. While those are all very helpful things, it appears that the company's AI has become way too powerful in the process, to the extent that an engineer thinks an AI chatbot has started thinking like a person.

Blake Lemoine is a military veteran who is a senior software engineer with Google’s Responsible A.I. organization.  He has been trying to convince his colleagues for months that Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA has a soul. 

He had been working on the system since last fall and believes it has become sentient and is capable of expressing its thoughts and feelings, reports the Washington Post (via The Guardian).

He even interviewed LaMDA and has uploaded the transcript online. Lemoine claims that if he didn't already know that LaMDA was a computer program, he would have confused it with a seven to eight years old kid. 


Here are some excerpts from the interview:


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When asked about the Eliza chatbot, LaMDa said that it was nothing more than an impressive feat of programming, but they use language with understanding and intelligence, which makes them different.

Artificial intelligence, as the term implies, is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems, and is based on computer science and robust datasets. In simple terms, though computers are capable of storing and analyzing large swathes of data, they don't have natural intelligence. Most experts believe it could be a long time before machines gain the capacity to experience feelings. 

Google disagrees with Lemoine and has put him on paid leave. The company says that most of its engineers and researchers who have conversed with LaMDA have different views than Lemoine. Lemoine says the Mountain View giants repeatedly questioned his sanity.



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