🤖 What if Google really did just invent human-level AI?

Also: 5 Quick Questions for … Our World in Data’s Hannah Ritchie on the state of the global environment

In This Issue

The Essay: What if Google really did just invent human-level AI?

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … Our World in Data’s Hannah Ritchie on the state of the global environment

Micro Reads: automating ports, the future of physics, Saudi spending on healthspan

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Quote of the Issue

“Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.” —Freeman Dyson

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The Essay

🤖 What if Google really did just invent human-level AI?

If someone claims to have developed or interacted with a sentient AI, the Sagan Standard — put forward by astronomer Carl Sagan regarding extraterrestrial contact — should immediately be applied: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And it’s unclear, to be generous, if Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google’s Responsible AI unit, has provided such powerful proof.

To briefly recap various news reports: Lemoine is suggesting that the company’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot can do far more than cleverly mimic human conversation. As quoted in a Washington Post profile by reporter Nitasha Tiku over the weekend, “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics.” Lemoine continued “I know a person when I talk to it. It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.” And to Lemoine, LaMDA is a person.