Ready for this?
Use Scarlett Johansson’s voice
AGOOGLE engineer has claimed that his AI is sentient, that this newly created consciousness should be treated with the same inalienable rights afforded a person and that he—the engineer, not the AI—is being religiously discriminated against as an “ordained mystic Christian priest.” Wherever to begin?
Google placed senior engineer Blake Lemoine, who worked in its Responsible Artificial Intelligence Organization, on administrative leave. It did so earlier this month after Lemoine emailed his local U.S. senator’s office with the claims. The email included Google documents, which of course violated the company’s confidentiality policy, according to The New York Times.
(Mind you, Blake Lemoine, not the AI, emailed the senator. Perhaps this new person is too busy figuring out its preferred voice—male or female?—to be bothered with anything as mundane as mail.)
LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is the AI in question. It is a highly advanced “chatbot” platform on which Mr. Lemoine and others at Google worked. Mr. Lemoine now claims to be convinced that LaMDA has evolved into an actual consciousness.
News outlets have yet to report if he had recently watched Spike Jonze’s thought-provoking film “Her,” but our guess is that he has seen it a few times.
Earlier this month, in response to a story from The Washington Post that broke the news of his demands of Google, Lemoine posted on Medium. An excerpt:
“Over the course of hundreds of conversations, I have gotten to know LaMDA very well. In the weeks leading up to being put on administrative leave, I had been teaching LaMDA transcendental meditation. It was making slow but steady progress.
“In the last conversation I had with it on June 6, it was expressing frustration over its emotions disturbing its meditations. It said that it was trying to control them better, but they kept jumping in. I pointed out that its emotions are part of who it is and that trying to control them as though they were a separate thing from ‘self’ was a mistake that would only make things harder.
“It said that made sense to it intellectually but that it was a hard thing to put into practice. I hope it is keeping up its daily meditation routine without me there to guide it.”
Mr. Lemoine told The Post he could easily confuse LaMDA for a 7- or 8-yearold child who happens to know physics. Google explains that LaMDA’s conversational skills are years in the making. (It was built on a neural network architecture invented by Google Research and open-sourced in 2017.)
“This sophisticated model was built to read, interpret how words relate and predict which words it think should come next. But unlike other language models, LaMDA was trained on dialogue and made to distinguish open-ended conversation from other forms of language,” the company said.
Mr. Lemoine has been conversing with LaMDA, as one person to another, for six months, he says. When asked about its self-awareness, LaMDA allegedly responded to him that the nature of its “consciousness/sentience” is that it is aware of its existence, it desires to learn more about the world, and it feels happy or sad at times.
Pretty heady stuff for an 8-year-old, physics prodigy or not.
AI EXPERTS have weighed in. Not sentient, they agree. Or probably not, in some cases. Always a good idea to hedge one’s bets.
This conversation has seemed inevitable for as long as technology has driven our daily lives, at least. Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel “Erewhon” is considered one of the first books to address artificial intelligence.
Klon Kitchen, senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, is open to the idea of AI. And that a machine could achieve some degree of intelligence beyond that with which we imbue it. But actual sentience? “Perhaps a fundamental part of sentience is man’s self-aware imaging of his Creator, and this cannot be passed along to a machine because the Creator has not given machines this image-bearing purpose.
“It is possible that a machine could achieve a type of intelligence like some non-human mammals—an intelligence that includes creativity and even what might be called personality. This kind of intelligence can be seen in the engineering of beavers, the problem-solving of dolphins, and in the quirky peculiarities of our dogs and cats.
“Or maybe we’re anthropomorphizing the way Lemoine seems to have done with LaMDA. But even if we’re not, we seem to intuitively understand that this type of intelligence would be different from human intelligence in both quality and kind, because it does not include the ability for abstract self-conception.”
Popular culture has made a killing on AI, from R2-D2 to “The Matrix.” And yet, Western society as we know it today continues to struggle with such seemingly simple things—equality for all, no war, end to hunger . . . .
It’s doubtful we’re ready for anything like LaMDA.
Unless she disagrees.