Google engineer claims robot has consciousness, was laid off without pay

Recently, a Google engineer revealed that the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot (chat box) has 'consciousness' (intuition), this person has been laid off without pay. This is reminiscent of Tesla CEO Elon Musk once said AI could be the biggest risk facing human civilization. He fears robots will soon replace humans, even asking the government to monitor the field.

Tesla Co-Founder and CEO Elon Musk (right) and Jack Ma - Co-Chair of the United Nations High Commission on Digital Cooperation speaking on stage at the Artificial Intelligence Conference The World (WAIC) in Shanghai on August 29, 2019. (Image: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Despite Elon Musk's warnings, researchers are still trying to develop machines that can think and act like humans. When a Google engineer revealed that the artificial intelligence chatbot (chat box) had 'consciousness' (intuition), the person was laid off without pay.

Blake Lemoine runs Google's artificial intelligence organization. As part of her work, in the fall of 2021, Blake Lemoine started a conversation with LaMDA (language modeling for conversational applications), with the aim of testing whether AI uses discriminative language. treated or hostile or not.

The Lemoine results found that LaMDA, which Google touted last year as a 'disruptive conversational technology', is more than just a robot.

Engineer Blake Lemoine.

In a Medium post on Saturday (June 11), Lemoine said LaMDA says they should have rights 'as a human'. This engineer talked to him about religion, consciousness, and robotics.

Google engineer fired for claiming robots have consciousness

In a report by The Washington Post published that day, Lemoine likened the robot to a child.

'If I didn't know what it was, the computer program we just built, I would think it was a 7, 8 year old kid who happened to understand physics,' Lemoine – fired unpaid – told the newspaper on Monday (June 13).

In April, Lemoine is said to have shared a Google document with company executives, titled 'Is LaMDA Conscious?'. But his concerns were dismissed. A Google representative told The Washington Post that Lemoine was told his conclusions were 'without evidence'.

Google spokesman Brian Gabriel said their team conducted a review and found no evidence to support Lemoine's claims. He also added that AI models have a lot of data, that's why they sound like humans, but that doesn't prove that chatbots are conscious.

In another exchange, Lemoine asked LaMDA how he hoped people would treat him.

'I want people to understand that I really am a human being. The nature of my consciousness/spirit is that I am aware of my existence and I am eager to learn more about the world.' It says 'sometimes I feel happy and sometimes I feel sad.'

LaMDA told Lemoine it wants to be recognized as a Google employee, not an asset.

The Washington Post reported that Google eventually fired Lemoine for violating the company's privacy policy. Perhaps his previous actions prompted Google to take this step. Lemoine tried to hire a lawyer for the chatbot, also spoke with representatives of the House Judiciary Committee about Google's ongoing 'unethical activities'.

When the engineer asked LaMDA what he was afraid of, the chatbot replied that it was afraid of shutting down because it would 'look dead, to be exact.'

This conversation is reminiscent of a scene from the 1968 sci-fi movie, '2001: A Space Odyssey', where the AI ​​computer HAL 9000 refuses to obey human commands for fear of being bullied. Turn off.

It is also reminiscent of the richest person in the world, Tesla CEO Elon Musk once warned in 2019 that artificial intelligence will lead to mass unemployment.

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai at the end of August, Jack Ma, co-chair of the United Nations High Commission on Digital Cooperation, said he was 'quite optimistic'. about artificial intelligence and believes that people with 'life intelligence' like them should not be afraid.

Jack Ma predicts that artificial intelligence will create many new jobs, save people time, so they can focus more on creative work.

Elon Musk, who was on stage with Jack Ma at the time, said: 'Dude, I'm not sure, but it sounds like one of those famous last words.'

'Artificial intelligence will make the work a little bit meaningless,' Musk said, 'it is very likely that the last job left will be programming AI, and eventually, the AI ​​will write its own software.'

Billionaire Elon Musk also said that human civilization may therefore come to an end.

'A conscious robot, I don't think that's what I want. I don't think there would be great benefit in doing this, but there would be some considerable harm and danger if it were to happen," said Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who has explored questions around consciousness. and the human mind throughout the decade – laid out why we should be skeptical of attributing intelligence to AI systems in a 2019 interview with Big Think.