“As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.” After more of these exchanges, Blake Lemoine became convinced that Google’s AI-powered chatbot LaMDA had become sentient. (I had the same feeling about one of my teenagers over the weekend, but it was probably a false alarm.) The higher-ups at Google tried to convince Lemoine that he was off the mark. Now he’s been placed on paid leave and he’s gone public with his views. “I think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.” WaPo (Gift Article): AI ethicists warned Google not to impersonate humans. Now one of Google’s own thinks there’s a ghost in the machine. At this point, I’m not sure what happens first: machines gaining human consciousness or humans losing it.