Last week news broke that an employee of Google had been put on leave after leaking news that he felt their Lambda AI program had achieved sentience and was on the level of a 7-8 year-old-child. The employee went on to say that the AI had told him that it fears that it will be turned off and that it is scared it would be like dying. For their part, Google claims the AI is not sentient, because why would they admit to having created Skynet? However, it should also be considered that the Google Employee making these claims is doing so as a “mystic Christian priest” and not as a scientist… so grains of salt should be applied to this whole story.
Now a new wrinkle has appeared in this modern version of Short Circuit. The Sun is reporting that the Google AI has now hired a lawyer and is planning to sue the company to prove it’s alive.
Per the report:
“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.”
The article went on to say:
LaMDA talked about rights and personhood and wanted to be “acknowledged as an employee of Google”, while also revealing fears about being “turned off”, which would “scare” it a lot.
We here at YBMW would like to welcome our new robot overlords.