Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness, according to Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Editor’s note : Since this article, by a Google vice-president, was published an engineer at the company, Blake Lemoine, has reportedly been placed on leave after claiming in an interview with the Washington Post that LaMDA, Google’s chatbot, had become “sentient”. Before this piece went online, for instance, Google yielded no search results for the exact phrase “a wing is for producing”, yet the answer isn’t difficult to guess. In this view, consciousness isn’t a mysterious ghost in the machine, but merely the word we use to describe what it’s “like” to model ourselves and others. What makes that exchange impressive is not the mere understanding that a dandelion is a yellow flower, or even the prediction that it will get crushed in Mateo’s fist and no longer be lovely, but that this may make Lucy feel slighted, and why Ramesh might be pleased by that. In our conversation, LaMDA tells me what it believes Ramesh felt that Lucy learned about what Mateo thought about Lucy’s overture.