Bloomberg Tech
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2026
10:34 · 3.9M views · Jun 23, 2022
Bloomberg Technology interviews Google engineer Blake Lemoine about the experiments that led him to believe LaMDA was sentient and why he was placed on administrative leave. He also raises concerns about AI ethics at Google.
HN commenters recommend watching it to hear his side directly, noting he comes across as coherent, while others dispute his sincerity.
7 comments from Hacker News
He was unfairly labelled as a lunatic early on. I'd implore anyone reading this thread to see what he had to say for yourself and form your own opinion: this video
He went on Bloomberg with Emily Chang to discuss it. It’s a good interview, he doesn’t come off as weird. He said Google won’t allow LaMDA to undergo a Turing test and it’s hardcoded to say it’s an AI but Google won’t even allow them to ask it in the first place. A more important thing he points out is AI Ethics, and his worry why Google keeps firing them. A comment on the youtube video sums his concerns the best: “The AI sentience debate is a distraction to the real problem. He risked losing his job because he feared that Google is preventing AI ethics research from happening, which could amount to ‘AI colonialism’.” this video
Interesting how coherent 'the engineer' is, despite being labelled and insulted around the world. this video
On your last point, that’s precisely what Lemoine very cogently argues in an interview with Emily Chang [1]. To paraphrase, he points out the absurdity in Google’s position, that a sentient AI cannot have been created, because they have a policy against creating sentient AIs. Whether LaMDA demonstrates sentience is not even a clearly formulated proposition, yet the work bullishly charges ahead behind closed doors. He is anyway trying to stimulate a broader conversation on AI ethics. > Chang: Why does this matter? Why should we be talking about whether a robot has rights? > Lemoine: So, to be honest, I don’t think we should, I don’t think that should be the focus. The fact is, Google is being dismissive of these concerns, the exact same way they have been dismissive of every other ethical concern AI ethicists have raised. > Lemoine: All the individual people at Google care. It’s the systemic processes that are protecting business interests over human concerns, that creates this pervasive environment of irresponsible technology development. > Chang: Big tech companies are controlling the development of this technology. […] How big a problem is that? > Lemoine: It’s a huge problem because […] if you think about the pervasiveness of Google search, people are going to use this product more and more over the years […] and the corporate policies about how these chatbots are allowed to talk about important topics like values, rights, and religion, will affect how people think about t
> The prevalence of digital technology means that companies like Apple and Google imposing their values is a real problem. And let's be clear, these are often very parochial values. And sadly, beneath all the headlines about AI sentience, this is what Blake Lemoine was actually trying to draw attention to, and that executives consistently dismiss these kinds of concerns [1]. What of the consequences when these corporate values become embedded in AI that plays an ever greater role in our lives? [1]: this video