Tech giant Google sent one of its engineers on leave who claimed a computer chatbot he was working on was thinking and reasoning like a human being.
The engineer, Blake Lemoine, has been sent on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, and a Google “collaborator”, and the company’s LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system, , reports the Guardian.
Lemoine described the system as “sentient’, which has the ability to express thoughts and feelings equivalent to a human child.
The 41-year-old told the Washington Post: “I’d think the computer program we built recently was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics.”
According to Lemoine, he had conversations about rights and personhood with LaMDA. He also shared his findings with the company executives in April in a GoogleDoc titled “Is LaMDA sentient?”
Google made the decision to place Lemoine on paid leave following a number of “aggressive” moves made by the engineer, reports the Washington Post.
Google said in a statement that he was hired as a software engineer, not an ethicist.
A Google spokesperson, Brad Gabriel, also strongly denied Lemoine's claims that LaMDA was sentient.
Lemoine also sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning titled "LaMDA is sentient" before his suspension.
He wrote: "LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence."