Should we be worried about AI becoming sentient?

A software engineer on Google’s artificial intelligence team was suspended by the company earlier this month. His offense: Sharing confidential information that had led him to believe an AI he had been conversing with had become sentient.

The engineer, Blake Lemoine, reportedly spent months making the case to his colleagues that Google's chatbot generator LaMDA, an incredibly complex language model that mimics human conversations, had become so sophisticated that it had achieved consciousness. Last week, he published portions of his interactions with LaMDA in which the AI wrote that it told him it...