ABOUT SENTIENT CHATBOTS

Don’t unplug your computer! Don’t throw away that smartphone! Just because a Google software engineer whose conclusions have been questioned says a computer program is sentient, meaning it can think and has feelings, doesn’t mean an attack of the cyborgs through your devices is imminent.

However, Blake Lemoine’s analysis should make us consider how little we have planned for a future where advances in robotics will increasingly change how we live. Already, automation has put thousands of Americans who lack higher-level skills out of a job.

But let’s get back to Lemoine, who was put on leave by Google for violating its confidentiality policy. Lemoine contends that the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) system that Google built to create chatbots has a soul. A chatbot is what you might be talking to when you call a company such as Amazon or Facebook about a customer service issue.

Google asked Lemoine to talk to LaMDA to make sure it wasn’t using discriminatory or hateful language. He says those conversations evolved to include topics stretching from religion to science fiction to personhood. “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,” Lemoine, 41, told The Washington Post. …

In the 2001 movie “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” a talking robot boy — who looks human in every way — longs, like Pinocchio, to be a real boy. His quest spans centuries, with plot twists and turns along the way, but in the end, “David” is what he is. So, too, is LaMDA. But as computer programs continue to learn, what human tricks come next?