Or do they?

Blake Lemoine an Alphabet engineer working on an AI Google chat bot names LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) thinks they might.

His belief is that his Bot has reached sentient level, the notion, that technology has humanlike feelings and is having independent thoughts, he is so adamant that he took Google to task over it and even tried to get LaMDA its own US legal representative. and when that didn’t work he decided to publish a transcript of his conversation with his Bot to prove that’s its thoughts are independent and unique.

The premise behind this technology is fascinating, its based on a neural programming network, that mimics the way the human brain thinks, is capable of ingesting 1.56 trillion words of public information and conversations and make “sense” and purpose out of it.

In this week’s on-air chat Hong Kong Radio 3’s Phil Whelan and I chat about the 5 questions that the engineer asked LaMDA and its responses and what the repercussion of this might be, if its true (spoiler alert – it’s not and I spell out why it’s not in our chat)

Listen now (16 mins 30 secs)