The ghost in the machine

Artificial intelligence is advancing so quickly that sentient systems may be possible in a decade or two.

- Peter Griff

If Blake Lemoine chose a spectacular way to blow up his own career, he has also certainly given the world something to think about.

The 41-year-old US Google engineer was last month put on administrative leave by the search engine giant after he went public with his claims that LaMDA, the artificial intelligence system under development by the company, has become sentient.

In other words, Lemoine maintained, this piece of software not only has the ability to think for itself, but also has feelings and emotions just like us humans. Lemoine argued that LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, should be afforded basic human rights.

Google quickly rejected the claim, which was also widely lambasted by AI experts across academia. LaMDA is essentially a very intelligent chatbot, which absorbs information gleaned from troves of internet data fed into it to produce sensible answers to questions.