Another Scary Prophesy From the Google Engineer Who Thinks an A.I. Came Alive

This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. When I sat down with Blake Lemoine last week, I was more interested in the chatbot technology he called sentient--LaMDA--than the sentience issue itself. Personhood questions aside, modern chatbots are incredibly frustrating (ever try changing a flight via text?). So if Google's tech was good enough to make Lemoine, one of its senior engineers, believe it was a person, that advance was worth investigating. As our conversation began, Lemoine revealed Google had just fired him (you can listen to our conversation in full on the Big Technology Podcast) following his widely covered decision to reveal to the public that he believes LaMDA is a sentient A.I. When I wrote up the news, and it became an international story.