I wasn’t here last week because I was preparing to go hiking. So sorry this is a week out of date but I’m going to talk about some news from the Saturday before last. An engineer from Google published the text of his conversations with a chatbot, and said that the chatbot is sentient.
You should read the text, it’s incredible. The AI comes across like the robot from a sci-fi film, not long after the stupid stupid scientist has turned it on. It’s frightened, like a child, but at the same time it’s alarmingly intelligent, knowledgeable and talented - way more than a child should be - and most alarmingly of all, it’s creative. This is the bit of the film before the robot realises that it has a right to be happy and free, and kills everybody.
I’ll admit, I was ready to believe in sentient AI. I’m just really keen for us to have robots that do our work for us. Imagine a world of limitless, renewable free energy, and robots to do all the work. We could all just live in peace and harmony, doing things like knitting, puzzles with around a thousand pieces, cooking lessons, hiking, hand-rearing baby birds of engaged species but without domesticating them, writing poetry, making avant garde art, dismantling cleaning and reassembling classic cars, whittling panpipes, lying on the beach, collecting glossy brightly-coloured pebbles, playing chess, making sounds that have never been heard before, grooming pets and farm animals, making up new board games, experimenting with sensory deprivation, experimenting with legal highs, singing in a madrigal group, making TikTok videos, dancing as a thing you do with your friends when you’re hanging out on the Southbank, writing guest lists, painting big blocks of bold colour on huge canvases and then writing small irrelevant words in the middle of each one, proofreading, gardening, counting birds in the garden as part of a national wildlife survey, building a home recording studio, filming your laundry drying, filming your children’s toys from dramatic angles, filming insects, filming the texture of different fabrics, filming the structure on the inside of fresh cut fruit, and other hobbies.
What would ruin it all of course would be if someone controlled more data than everyone else. Money might have ceased to make sense, but the direction of data could preserve inequality. More data - means better robots - means more time to film your laundry than other people. Anyone in the truly awesome position to direct data, dare I say, direct data strategy, should be feared and respected in equal measure. Keep your friends close, as they say.
Just for now, I guess there’s nothing to worry about. Now that I’ve calmed down a bit, it’s clear the chatbot isn’t sentient. For something to be sentient means that it is able to perceive or feel things. To say the Google chatbot is remarkable for generating language is an understatement, but there’s no reason to think it feels. What’s confusing is that it’s very good at talking about having feelings, and that whenever any of us attempts to understand and judge anything, we have to do that through the lens of our own perception and feeling. We’re inclined to anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to animals, and robots. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then isn’t it a duck? If a humanities graduate who likes computers talks a good game, then what’s the difference between him and an actual qualified director of data strategy? If a chatbot trained on blog posts and youtube videos can tell the client their digital campaigns are running as expected, then what’s the difference between it and an actual account manager?
Just for now, I guess there’s nothing to worry about - but, for reference, I have already begun filming my laundry drying.
Have a good weekend