Opinion | Why did a Google engineer say that its AI was conscious?

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Opinion | Why did a Google engineer say that its AI was conscious?
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Google has AI so impressive that an engineer wanted a lawyer for it.

, it’s hard not to be impressed by its sophistication. Its responses often sound just like a smart, engaging human with opinions on everything from Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics to"Les Misérables" to its own purported personhood . It raises questions of what it really would mean for artificial intelligence to achieve or surpass human-like consciousness, and how we would know when it did.

In the real world, the question of sentience comes up, for example, with respect to other nonhuman animals, how sentient they are, is it OK to cause them pain and suffering? No one really has an agreed-upon definition that says, “At this level of intelligence, something is sentient.” At the beginning, it doesn't — it can't — know which words just come next. But by being trained on billions and billions of human-created sentences, it learns, eventually, what kinds of words come next, and it's able to put words together very well. It's so big, it has so many simulated neurons and so on, that it's able to essentially memorize all kinds of human-created text and recombine them, and stitch different pieces together.

That being said, you know, experts are humans, too. They can be fooled. We humans are very prone to interpreting text that sounds human as having an agent behind it, some intelligent conscious agent. And that makes sense, right? Language is a social thing, it’s communication between conscious agents who have reasons for communicating. So we assume that's what's happening. People are fooled even by much simpler systems than LaMDA. It's been happening since even the beginning of AI.

You wrote a whole book casting a skeptical eye upon various claims about the imminence of AI that can match or surpass human ability. Are there different camps?There are definitely different camps. There are a lot of very well-respected AI researchers who think that artificial general intelligence systems — that would be the level of human intelligence — are imminent, that they're going to be here in a decade or so.

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