The Soul of a New Machine Learning System

Interesting that congressional hearings about January 6 are drawing NFL-style audiences. Can't wait for the Peyton and Eli version! The world of AI was shaken this week by a report in The Washington Post that a Google engineer had run into trouble at the company after insisting that a conversational system called LaMDA was, literally, a person. The subject of the story, Blake Lemoine, asked his bosses to recognize, or at least consider, that the computer system its engineers created is sentient--and that it has a soul. He knows this because LaMDA, which Lemoine considers a friend, told him so.