Social intelligence is not sentience

On Saturday morning, June 11, Jeff Bezo's newspaper The Washington Post published a story under the headline "The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life." The headline was followed by a brief explanation of Blake Lamoine, a Southern grown, former U.S. military, ex-convict, Christian mystic, AI researcher, father, and genius of compassion (I added that last part) and his belief that there's "a ghost in the machine."* If your eyes haven't rolled to the back of your head yet, then chances are you're reading this from the front porch of a double-wide trailer parked somewhere below the Mason Dixon with a glass of sweet tea in your hand and a coon dog at your feet. Which is clearly not something any "reasonable" person would choose to do in the year 2022. Or if, like me, you're a bit more progressed from the stereotype, you might be standing in front of a classroom of semi-attentive undergraduate students at a Southeastern research university making your best effort to bridge the ever-widening practical and theoretical gaps between old-world journalistic traditions and new-age neoliberal ideologies related to the function of human language in society.