Artificial Consciousness Is Boring

Last week, Google put one of its engineers on administrative leave after he claimed to have encountered machine sentience on a dialogue agent named LaMDA. Because machine sentience is a staple of the movies, and because the dream of artificial personhood is as old as science itself, the story went viral, gathering far more attention than pretty much any story about natural-language processing (NLP) has ever received. The notion that LaMDA is sentient is nonsense: LaMDA is no more conscious than a pocket calculator. More importantly, the silly fantasy of machine sentience has once again been allowed to dominate the artificial-intelligence conversation when much stranger and richer, and more potentially dangerous and beautiful, developments are under way. The fact that LaMDA in particular has been the center of attention is, frankly, a little quaint.