Rights of the robots: the new laws we need before AI takes over

We now live in a world where the most powerful computing systems can argue about politics; where they can flirt, banter and manipulate; where they can advise on mental health, on relationships or on the law; and where they can do all these things as well as the most eloquent humans -- or better. For most of history we took for granted that -- gods and spirits aside -- humans were the only earthly generators of words, of ideas, of arguments, of art. Last week Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, was placed on leave after claiming that a computer system called LaMDA had achieved "sentience". Lemoine, 41, who is also a "mystic Christian priest", wrote that the