Opinion: AI’s hold over humans is starting to get stronger

Zuckerberg has said that Facebook would use more AI recommendations for people’s newsfeeds, instead of showing content based on what friends and family were looking at. — Getty Images/TNS

It has been an exasperating few weeks for computer scientists. They’ve been falling over each other to publicly denounce claims from Google engineer Blake Lemoine, chronicled in a Washington Post report, that his employer’s language-predicting system was sentient and deserved all of the rights associated with consciousness.

To be clear, current artificial intelligence systems are decades away from being able to experience feelings and, in fact, may never do so.