It's Alive!

A Google engineer gets fired

This week, an engineer at Google made a public claim that Google artificial intelligence is sentient, and permission was needed to perform experiments on it. From Yahoo:

Blake Lemoine, who is currently on leave from the search giant, said that the system had become his “friend” and that his claim it has a soul was motivated by his religious beliefs.

The two had “hundreds of conversations”, he said in a blog post, “about stuff you might simply talk to a friend about”. “Things like which movies it likes, what its hopes and dreams are, what it’s been doing lately and whether it could give me advice on personal issues relevant to my real life,” he wrote.

This claim led to shouts of ridicule from artificial intelligence experts the world over. Google technologists are insisting it is not true - but then they would, wouldn’t they? Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI and director of the school’s Digital Economy Lab says we have to wait fifty years…