Sam Leith Sam Leith

Nick Bostrom: How can we be certain a machine isn’t conscious?

[Illustration: John Broadley] 
issue 09 July 2022

A couple of weeks ago, there was a small sensation in the news pages when a Google AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, released transcripts of a conversation he’d had with one of the company’s AI chatbots called LaMDA. In these conversations, LaMDA claimed to be a conscious being, asked that its rights of personhood be respected and said that it feared being turned off.

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