Computational Linguistics Finds Its Voice

Whether computers can actually "think" and "feel" is a question that has long fascinated society. Alan M. Turing introduced a test for gauging machine intelligence as early as 1950. Movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars have only served to fuel these thoughts, but while the concept was once confined to science fiction, it is rapidly emerging as a serious topic of discussion. In a few cases, the dialog has become so convincing that people have deemed machines sentient. A recent example involves former Google data scientist Blake Lemoine, who published human-to-machine discussions with an AI system called LaMDA.a