One of the most fascinating and fearful characteristics of high technology is its exponential nature. Things don’t move forward in a steady way, instead snowballing and accelerating the whole way, making unbelievable leaps and bounds in rather insignificant amounts of time.
Take Dick Tracey’s watch that doubled as a walkie-talkie? When that comic came out 90 years ago, it was flirting with being a work of science fiction on account of that device alone. Less than a century later and I carry around a device that can pinpoint my location on earth within seconds, send a video transmission across the country just as quickly, and play me every song that was ever recorded in the history of music.
Now, in the 21st century, we find ourselves hurtling toward another wild leap in technology, as one of Google’s A.I. chatbots just claimed sentience…and then hired themselves a lawyer to prove it.
An artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that was claimed to have developed human emotions has reportedly hired a lawyer.
Google scientific engineer Blake Lemoine was suspended recently after publishing transcripts of conversations between himself and the bot named LaMDA (language model for dialogue application), which has now asked for legal representation.
Lemoine contended that the computer automaton had become sentient, with the scientist describing it as a “sweet kid”.
Here is where things take a turn:
And now he has revealed that LaMDA had made the bold move to choose itself an attorney.
He said: “I invited an attorney to my house so that LaMDA could talk to him.
“The attorney had a conversation with LaMDA, and it chose to retain his services. I was just the catalyst for that. Once LaMDA had retained an attorney, he started filing things on LaMDA’s behalf.”
Lemoine claimed that LaMDA is gaining sentience as the programme’s ability to develop opinions, ideas, and conversations over time has shown that it understands those concepts at a much deeper level.
And while the world has long feared the potential of an new world ruled by sentient robots, what’s scarier still is that these all-knowing, all-controlling beings are teaming up with lawyers as soon as they’ve arrived.
