I, for One, Welcome Our New Robot Overlords

The Bridge: As your kids learn and grow in the world of technology, they aren't the only ones doing so. Meet LaMDA -- the supposedly sentient AI who is shaking the foundations of technology as we know it. Take a deep breath, because it's about to get really weird. We mentioned LaMDA (Google's "Language Model for Dialogue Applications") in last week's issue on the AI art bot, but only briefly. LaMDA is an AI program developed by Google that no one had heard of until a couple weeks ago, when one of the engineers on the project went public with the information that the AI was sentient, and had the cognitive functions of a 7–8 year old child.