Bryson deliberates on whether AI could ever become ‘human’ and what measures can be taken to prevent the wool from being pulled over our eyes.
Joanna Bryson, Professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School and one of the founding members of the Centre for Digital Governance, wrote an article in the popular American online portal Wired, weighing in on the recent debates surrounding ‘sentience’ in Artificial Intelligence (AI). In early June 2022, a Google engineer claimed that Google’s new programme LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) had become human-like and deserved ethical consideration, launching a discourse on the extent to which AI has evolved and ever could.
Bryson, in her article, ruminates on the human condition, the complexities that lie behind the term ‘sentience’ and the difficulties that humans may face in recognising a machine behind a conversation. She argues for algorithmic transparency to support the widespread understanding that apparently sentient programmes are indeed intelligent, but not human. She also suggests that understanding what makes humans difficult to replace is more important than raw intelligence for understanding their worth.
Daniel C. Dennett, leading American cognitive scientist and Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, shared the article on Twitter describing it as “the best piece I've read on the current (over-)reaction to Google's engineer who finds sentience in LaMDA”. Bryson had earlier been cited by other authors who also wrote about the LaMDA issue in Bild and the Jerusalem Post.
Read the full Wired article here.
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About the author
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Joanna Bryson, Professor of Ethics and Technology