news devices Google’s AI fears not being contacted: is it really conscious?
Research and development within Google labs has led to the emergence of massive technological developments, one of which is based on neural networks has enabled the American giant to create artificial intelligence that appears to exceed the company’s expectations, and the less so said engineer Blake Lemoine, before he was suspended from his tasks.
Google engineer suspended due to artificial intelligence
It’s a pretty crazy story that this Google engineer went through. After working for a long time on AI design, engineer Blake Lemoine was suspended from his duties after declaring loud and clear that this AI had a conscience.
LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications) is an artificial intelligence based on the neural network architecture of switches. LaMDA was unveiled last year and is a complex system capable of creating “talking bots,” software that can understand, analyze, and respond to humans, without predefined scripts.
Via his Twitter account, Blake Lemoine transcribed entire sections of the conversations he was going to have with IA LaMDA. In his text he describes an artificial intelligence that is able to respond perfectly to his words, even speaking from his conscience. According to him, Lambda would have asserted that she was indeed a person in her own right.
AI evokes tastes, beliefs, and even social issues such as injustice. Even if this text appears to be straight from the work of science fiction, there is no evidence that these discussion texts are authentic. Later, Google suspended the engineer, claiming that he was publishing a story that was not based on a source but only his own beliefs.
You should know that Blake Lemoine is a 41-year-old engineer who works on this project part-time and was raised in a conservative Christian family, which perfectly matches the narrative that AI would have conveyed.
Is Google’s artificial intelligence conscious?
This is an important fact to bear in mind because many of us grew up with sci-fi acts like Star Wars or the Terminator, which have shaped our entire culture and beliefs. Even if most of us realize that it remains a way of telling something, we don’t easily get all these cognitive biases out of our heads.
Architect Blake Lemoine takes his own culture and personal beliefs with him and glues them to this project in order to believe what he would like to see.
Lemoine uses the neuter pronoun “it” to qualify the AI because it would have shown him that this is how you like to be gendered. The engineer asserts that Lambda wanted to be seen as a real employee and not an experience or even a “project”. According to artificial intelligence experts, Lemoyne had predicted his fantasy of a sensitive artificial intelligence based on his personal beliefs.
Today, we can then say that LaMDA does not have a conscience, or even a “soul,” because unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your convictions), scientists cannot conceive of so-called strong artificial intelligence, that is, to say, self-conscious.