Real risks behind artificial intelligence go way beyond fear of sentience, AI experts warn

A former Google engineer made waves this past month with claims the tech company's new chat bot feature gained sentience, but technology experts say there are other, more concerning risks artificial intelligence poses to society. Blake Lemoine received pushback when he argued the bot, known as LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is now capable of feeling. He was placed on leave in June after giving documents to a Senate committee, claiming the bot discriminated against people on the basis of religion, among other biases. Lemoine was fired this past month for what the company says is violating data security policies, but he still believes LaMDA poses a problem as AI becomes more engrained in society. "These are just engineers, building bigger and better systems for increasing the revenue into Google with no mindset towards ethics," Lemoine told Insider earlier this week, referring to what he believes is Google's lack of preparation for a technology that gains personhood.