The Problems with AI Go Way Beyond Sentience

The story of a Google engineer (and Christian mystic) who saw signs of personhood in Google's latest artificially intelligent chatbot software and was later fired has reignited public debate over whether any of today's AI systems are sentient. The consensus among experts is that no, they are not: see this, this, this, and this, for example. We reached the same conclusion via a different path, using a little mathematical formalism to burn off the fog of confusion. A chatbot is a function. But functions can be powerful.