Sentient artificial intelligence: A dream & a nightmare for scientists

The tech community has been both amused and upset by the revelation that a Google engineer thinks an artificial intelligence (AI) he works with has developed self-awareness. Blake Lemoine has been placed on leave (as a probable precursor to dismissal) for breaking his non-disclosure agreement with his employer.

Lemoine went public with his belief that LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is self-aware, and released a transcript of the conversation that convinced him the AI was not accidentally scoring high on an impromptu Turing test.

Pioneering computer scientist and genius logician Alan Turing proposed a famous test for judging if a computer could emulate human behaviour: Could a machine have a (free-flowing) conversation with a human, where the human didn’t figure out