How Machines Fool Us Into Thinking They Have Feelings

In June 2022, few media outlets shied away from reporting the story: an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineer at Google named Blake Lemoine claimed that his machine had become conscious, sentient, which he revealed through The Washington Post and accompanied with the publication on his blog of an astonishing interview with the AI system. The news gave rise to a flood of comments and opinions with echoes and references to science fiction, although it was short-lived. Google officials categorically denied Lemoine's claims, and he was fired shortly afterwards for breaching his confidentiality agreement. But if this particular episode was found to be false and brought to an early end, it was in fact just another milestone in a long and still unresolved controversy: can a machine feel and know it exists, and will it ever do so, with or without our intervention or consent? It is so familiar to us because we have experienced it countless times through our imagination. Perhaps the Maschinenmensch in Metropolis (1927) was the earliest cinematic example for the general public, although its precursors can be traced back at least as far back as Frankenstein.