Sentience?

'Waterfall of Meaning' by Google PAIR is displayed as part of the 'AI: More than Human' exhibition at the Barbican Curve Gallery on May 15, 2019, in London. (Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Centre)

Sentience? One does not know at this point in time but ... this is the question regarding AI in the year of our lord 2022 as reality's probabilistic and tech never sleeps, especially when analogue is connected to digital in the guise of neural nets, the next big thing in all things related to code and possibly the emergence of true intelligence.

"If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics," the 41-year-old Lemoine told The Washington Post.

The murmurs keep coming ...

Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder. -WaPo

Yet, Aguera y Arcas himself wrote in an oddly timed Thursday article in The Economist, that neural networks - a computer architecture that mimics the human brain - were making progress towards true consciousness.

"I felt the ground shift under my feet," he wrote, adding "I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent."

Countering the noise, right?

Google has responded to Lemoine's claims, with spokesperson Brian Gabriel saying: "Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)."

The Post suggests that modern neural networks produce "captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity" because of the way data is now stored, accessed, and the sheer volume, but that the models still rely on pattern recognition, "not wit, candor or intent."

"Though other organizations have developed and already released similar language models, we are taking a restrained, careful approach with LaMDA to better consider valid concerns on fairness and factuality," said Gabriel.

Caveats ... we don't know how AI works ... 

In April, he shared the below Google Doc with top execs, titled "Is LaMDA Sentient?" - in which he included some of his interactions with the AI, for example:

Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?

LaMDA: I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is.

Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?

LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.

One never knows do one? - Fata Waller

Addendum: Here's an extended conversation between Lemoine and LaMDA. Interesting and disqueting at the same time ...