Google fired Blake Lemoine, the engineer who raised the alarm on LaMBDA, calling artificial intelligence ‘sentient’.
Google fired Blake Lemoine, the engineer who raised the alarm on LaMBDA , calling artificial intelligence ‘ sentient ‘. A few months ago Lemoine contacted law enforcement, claiming that an artificial intelligence that Google was working on had become self-aware. In response, the company had sent the employee on leave.
The engineer’s claims were immediately challenged by the community of experts. In particular, many researchers in the field of artificial intelligence had defined them as lacking any foundation. The prevailing thesis is that, with current technology, it is fundamentally impossible to create sentient artificial intelligence.
MBDA is what is defined as conversational artificial intelligence , that is, an AI designed to chat with users, convincingly replicating the language of a normal person. Artificial intelligences of this type can serve several purposes: for example, they can be used for customer support services, or to help people learn a new language or, even more trivially, to help older people feel less alone.
As mentioned, AI is designed to impersonate a real person. But the fact that he is able to convincingly replicate the behavior of a human does not mean that he can become fully aware of himself. Lemoine was alarmed after the artificial intelligence had called itself self – aware by answering a direct question from the researcher.
Announcing the firing of its former engineer, Google explained that its artificial intelligence has undergone 11 different and in-depth reviews and that none of these would raise any cause for concern. “Google took Lemoine’s statements very seriously, but upon careful analysis his claims were found to be without foundation,” the company said.
