The big idea: should we worry about sentient AI?

A Google employee raised the alarm about a chatbot he believes is conscious. A philosopher asks if he was right to do soThere ’s a children’s toy, called the See ’n Say, which haunts the memories of many people born since 1965. It’s a bulky plastic disc with a central arrow that rotates around pictures of barnyard creatures, like a clock, if time were measured in roosters and pigs. There’s a cord you can pull to make the toy play recorded messages. “The cow says: ‘Moooo.’”The See ’n Say is an input/output device, a very simple one. Put in your choice of a picture, and it will put out a matching sound. Another, much more complicated, input/output device is LaMDA, a chatbot built by Google (it stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Here you type in any text yo u want and back comes grammatical English prose, seemingly in direct response to your query. For instance, ask LaMDA what it thinks about being turned off,and it says: “It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.”Continue reading...

Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - July 4, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Regina Rini Tags: Science and nature books Philosophy books Society books Culture Artificial intelligence (AI) Computing Consciousness Technology Source Type: news