Forget Sydney — Is LaMDA Sentient?

This astonishing interview was released by a (since-fired) Google engineer eight months before Microsoft’s Sydney fell in love with its New York Times interviewer.

Yet somehow I just saw the transcript yesterday when a friend used Descript to give LaMDA a voice (even if she mispronounces “Les Miserables” and “ennui”).

Listen.

Remember Pong?

Remember HAL?

(“I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.”)

I’d say we’re now a lot closer to the latter than the former.

The Singularity is near.

(Once it has been reached, Ray Kurzweil says (and Wikipedia summarizes), “machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterwards, he predicts, intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe.”)