Your Bot is Still Not Your Friend

Whatever appearances may suggest (Image: Getty)

Mon, 20 Jun 2022

By Parmy OlsonIt has been an exasperating week for computer scientists. They’ve been falling over each other to publicly denounce claims from Google engineer Blake Lemoine, chronicled in a Washington Post report, that his employer’s language-predicting system was sentient and deserved all of the rights associated with consciousness.To be clear, current artificial intelligence systems are decades away from being able to experience feelings and, in fact, may never do so.Their smarts today are confined to very...

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