TECHNOLOGY: Skynet is upon us, the sky is falling

RECENTLY, Google software engineer Blake Lemoine posted the transcript of a conversation he and a collaborator had with the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot, which convinced him that it was sentient.

Google suspended him for allegedly violating the company’s confidentiality policy, but the AI genie was already out of the bottle. By the strict standards of the ‘Turing Test’ – a system passes the test if its behaviour is indistinguishable from a human’s, or if it can convince a person that it’s a person too – LaMDA is true AI.