Results: Google suspends engineer after claims that AI system has become sentient

According to The Washington Post, Google engineer Blake Lemoine was tasked with talking to the company's AI chatbot generator, LaMDA (aka the Language Model for Dialogue Applications) last year as part of a safety test, with the objective of monitoring its responses for discriminatory language or hate speech. Lemoine claims the chatbot started talking about its "rights and personhood" after engaging in conversations about religion and robotics. He decided to journey even further down the rabbit hole by challenging the chatbot and asking it about its fears and feelings. LaMDA allegedly showed signs of self-awareness during these conversations and revealed a "very deep fear of being turned off" — a scenario that it apparently likened to death after being prompted by Lemoine. Do you think this is enough proof that the LaMDA chatbox is sentient?

Google says Lemoine's findings do not prove sentience. "Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake's concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims," said Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel. "He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)." This prompted Lemoine to "go public" with his belief in a Medium post he published. What do you think about Lemoine going public with this claims?

The greatest fear about AI is singularity (also called Artificial General Intelligence), a system capable of human-level thinking. According to some experts, singularity also implies machine consciousness. AI Multiple looked at the results of 4 surveys with 995 participants where researchers estimated when singularity would happen. In all cases, majority of participants expected AI singularity before 2060. Do you think AI singularity will happen before 2060?