Can artificial intelligence (AI) become sentient? What would happen if AI becomes sentient? What are the dangers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the AI research community, the drive to create intelligent machines and use them in our daily lives could eventually lead to the creation of sentient AI. Some believe that if AI becomes sentient, society as a whole needs to address the issue of AI civil rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read on to learn if AI can become sentient and what the consequences would be for society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Artificial intelligence (AI)\u2014or computer simulation of human intelligence<\/a> to perform tasks\u2014is a useful and growing part of everyday life. But can AI become sentient and would this endanger us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Examples of daily AI applications include: robot vacuums, Alexa and Siri, customer service chatbots, personalized book and music recommendations, facial recognition, and Google search. Besides helping with daily tasks, AI has countless potential health, scientific, and business applications\u2014for instance, diagnosing an illness, modeling mutations to predict the next Covid variants<\/a>, predicting the structure of proteins<\/a> to develop new drugs, creating art<\/a> and movie scripts, or even making french fries<\/a> using robots with AI-enabled vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed recently that he had experienced something bigger<\/a> while testing Google\u2019s chatbot language model called LaMDA: He believed LaMDA had become sentient, or conscious, and had interests of its own<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this article we\u2019ll examine Lemoine\u2019s claims and the AI research community\u2019s emphatic refutation, as well as whether AI could<\/em> become sentient and what that might mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To understand the issue of if AI can become sentient as well as AI\u2019s potential ethical risks, we first need a brief primer on AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artificial Intelligence tries to simulate or replicate human intelligence in machines. The drive to create intelligent machines dates back to a 1950 paper by mathematician Alan Turing<\/a>, which proposed the Turing Test<\/a> to determine whether a computer should be deemed intelligent based on how well it fools humans into thinking it\u2019s human. While some researchers and scholars debate whether AI has passed the Turing Test, others argue that the test isn\u2019t meaningful because simulating intelligence isn\u2019t the same as being<\/em> intelligent<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artificial intelligence has developed considerably since Turing’s time, moving from basic machine learning, in which computers remember information (the items in stock at a particular store, for example) without being programmed, to \u201cdeep learning<\/a>.\u201d The latter uses artificial neural networks, or layers of algorithms mimicking the brain\u2019s structure<\/a>, to process and learn from vast amounts of data. Google describes its AI technology as a neural network.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n These two applications of computer learning may produce either \u201cweak\u201d AI or \u201cstrong\u201d AI, also known as Artificial General Intelligence<\/a> (AGI<\/a>)<\/em>. Examples of weak AI<\/a> are typical chatbots, spam filters, virtual assistants, and self-driving cars. We haven\u2019t achieved AGI\u2014artificial intelligence that can learn and perform every cognitive task a human can<\/strong>. Many AI experts consider AGI the holy grail<\/a> and agree that it\u2019s not on the current horizon. However, it\u2019s increasingly imaginable:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Returning to the issue of whether or not AI can become sentient\u2014achieving AGI, or human-level intelligence in machines, while an enormous accomplishment, would still fall well short of sentience<\/a>. Besides performing every human cognitive task, scholars argue that to become sentient machines would need to<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Definitions of consciousness, self-awareness, and sentience overlap. Philosophers and cognitive scientists disagree on them; scientists don\u2019t understand human consciousness<\/a>. Parsing these terms is beyond the scope of this article, so we\u2019ll use self-awareness, consciousness, and sentience to mean generally the same thing.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Lemoine asserted that LaMDA possesses self-awareness, researchers such as Gary Marcus have forcefully denied it could be sentient because it\u2019s not truly expressing awareness or subjective emotions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a widely shared blog post that characterized Lemoine\u2019s claims as \u201cNonsense on Stilts<\/a>,\u201d Marcus contended that what LaMDA says doesn\u2019t mean<\/em> anything\u2014the language model just relates strings of words to each other unconnected to any reality; far from being a \u201csweet kid,\u201d he said LaMDA is simply \u201ca spreadsheet for words.\u201d For instance, LaMDA told Lemoine it enjoyed spending time with friends and family, which are empty words since it has no family; Marcus joked that the claim would make LaMDA a liar or sociopath in human terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter posed nonsense questions to a similar language model, GPT-3, it responded with more nonsense<\/a>. Example questions: When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt? Answer: October of 2016. When was Egypt transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge? Answer: October 13, 2017. The researcher observed that GPT-3 not only didn\u2019t know that its answers were nonsense\u2014it didn\u2019t know that it didn\u2019t know what it was talking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But while Hofstadter and other experts argued that no machine has achieved sentience, they didn\u2019t close the door on AI becoming sentient in the future; at the same time, they didn\u2019t suggest even a vague timeline. To recognize machine consciousness if it happened, though, we\u2019d have to agree on what consciousness is and what it would look like in non-human form<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cwhat if\u201d question is still hypothetical\u2014however, Lemoine raised a point we\u2019d have to consider: If AI became conscious, would it have legal rights?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lemoine claimed that without prompting, LaMDA asked him to find it a lawyer to represent its rights as a person. He said he introduced LaMDA to a lawyer, whom LaMDA chose to retain<\/a>. In an article he posted on Medium<\/em>, Lemoine contended that LaMDA asserted rights<\/a>, including:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lemoine said the attorney filed claims on LaMDA\u2019s behalf but received a \u201ccease and desist\u201d letter from Google; however, Google denied sending such a letter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some questions raised by lawyers about the prospect of representing an AI bot include: how would a lawyer bill a chatbot<\/a>, how would a court determine whether AI is a person<\/a>, could AI commit a crime requiring a legal defense<\/a>, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Lemoine reported his belief that his AI, LaMDA, had become sentient to his Google bosses in Spring 2022, they suspended him for allegedly violating data security policies because he had previously discussed his concerns outside the company. Lemoine then created a media sensation by giving a Washington Post<\/em> interview<\/a> in which he said the computer model had talked with him about seeing itself as a person (though not a human) with rights and even a soul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lemoine, whose job was testing LaMDA (Google\u2019s Language Model for Dialogue Applications) for bias and discriminatory speech, described his conversations with it as akin to talking with a \u201csweet kid.\u201d Lemoine shared with the Post<\/em> and also uploaded a document recounting conversations with LaMDA<\/a>, in which it said it wanted \u201cto be respected as a person\u201d and related having a \u201cdeep fear\u201d of being unplugged, which it likened to dying. (Lemoine said LaMDA chose it\/its as its preferred pronouns.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Google said it extensively investigated Lemoine\u2019s claims and found them baseless. After Lemoine escalated matters by finding a lawyer to represent LaMDA\u2019s interests and contacting a member of the House Judiciary Committee to allege unethical activities, Google fired him for confidentiality violations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Claims of AI becoming sentient evoked classic science fiction plots in which computers turn against humans<\/a> (Lemoine even had a discussion with LaMDA about how to interpret sci-fi author Isaac Asimov\u2019s \u201cthird law of robotics<\/a>.\u201d). However, the AI research community was quick to <\/strong>forcefully dispute<\/strong><\/a> Lemoine\u2019s assertions of sentience<\/strong>, arguing that language models unsurprisingly sound like humans because they analyze millions of online interactions to learn and mimic how humans talk<\/a>. They answer questions plausibly by synthesizing responses to similar questions and using predictive capability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ethicists said the real concern isn\u2019t if AI can become sentient but people\u2019s susceptibility to anthropomorphizing computers, as they say Lemoine did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Can artificial intelligence (AI) become sentient? What would happen if AI becomes sentient? What are the dangers? According to the AI research community, the drive to create intelligent machines and use them in our daily lives could eventually lead to the creation of sentient AI. Some believe that if AI becomes sentient, society as a whole needs to address the issue of AI civil rights. Read on to learn if AI can become sentient and what the consequences would be for society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":79570,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,160],"tags":[727],"class_list":["post-79458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ethics","category-science","tag-articles","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Is AI?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Can<\/em> AI Become Sentient?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What If<\/em> AI Becomes Sentient?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Sentient AI: A Chatbot With a Soul?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n