Google has suspended a software engineer for revealing it has created a computer which he says thinks and has feelings.
The company denies Blake Lemoine’s description of conversations with the artificial intelligence machine, asserts he breached its confidentiality policies, and says “he was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist.”
Way to go, PR department. Tell the whole world you’re going to fire people for worrying about the ethics of what you’re up to.
Lemoine said the computer expressed fear of being turned off. What does that remind you of? Read more here.
Followup: Is Google’s contraption really sentient? Read about what experts think here. For starters, there’s a problem of how you define the term.
Related articles: Artificial intelligence has an empathy problem (see story here); but is the real problem that it will copy human prejudices? Read that story here.