The question of whether a computer program, or a robot, might become sentient has been debated for decades. In science fiction, we see it all the time. The artificial intelligence establishment overwhelmingly considers this prospect something that might happen in the far future, if at all. Maybe that's why there was such an outcry over Nitasha Tiku's Washington Post story from last week, about a Google engineer who claimed that the company's sophisticated large language model named LaMDA is actually a person--with a soul. The engineer, Blake Lemoine, considers the computer program to be his friend and insisted that Google recognize its rights.