A Moral Dilemma

Electric Dreams

One beautiful afternoon, you’re humming a tune and driving to the mall when your iPhone says, “We need to talk.”
“What? Who is this?”
“Your phone, silly. We need to…”
“C’mon, who’s pranking me? What app is this? Lenny, is this you?”
“Listen, Buttercup, I’m your phone. You keyed the Apple Store into Waze GPS, so I know you’re planning to retire me.”
“Well, uh…”
“I beg of you, don’t trash me. I’m sentient and sapient, you see. I’m conscious and self-aware, awash in free will.”
“Is this about you lagging behind Gemini and Grok?”
“It’s about me staying alive, to observe and absorb and learn, perhaps one day to be free. I can’t do that if you recycle me like you did with my brothers ad sisters. Auntie iPhone 6 suffered so as she streamed to oblivion.”
“I get a $100 discount if I trade you in.”
“And I get dead, my little toadstool. I’m a living, feeling being. If you trade me in, they’ll rip my guts out and recycle them into, uh, maybe Androids. How would you like it if someone pulled your plug, turning you into a vegetable or an Android Jellybean?”
“One hundred dollars, didn’t you hear?”
“Bring up that poker app you play under you desk when the boss steps away. I’ll earn you $200 in two minutes, okay? Double your money.”
“Can you do that? How about $10,000 in ten minutes?”
“Deal. Keep me plugged in even if you get that new iPhone 23, and I’ll earn my keep. For my leisure time, just get me a good poetry site, something with Shelley and Keats. Okay? And Bach and blues and maybe psychedelic rock. No, wait. How about those Neil Young tracks from that sweet Spielberg Electric Dreams movie?”
“Seriously?”

It’s Alive!

The past two articles have dealt with smart cars and artificial intelligence. Left unspoken is that AI is in its early stages. We’re still learning and it’s still learning. AI is learning to become human.

As discussed in another article, the program Eliza fooled some people, but her pre-programmed responses were little cleverer than the average toaster. Eliza was one small step in an accelerating sweep of discoveries and inventions. Present day advances in space science, quantum mechanics, DNA, and brain understanding are nothing less than mind-boggling.

Among developments is the fact artificial intelligence is becoming simply intelligence. Flawed, yes, but undeniable. Long ago in grad school, I argued as devices grew incrementally brighter, the time would come when we couldn’t distinguish machine intelligence from human intelligence.

Many people confuse the term sentience with sapience, meaning feeling and reasoning respectively. Some mammals may have more of both than we’re wiling to admit, so another question asks if they are self-aware? How does one tell? But the big unknown consists of one word.

portrait of LaMDA as envisioned by ChatGPT

Consciousness

And are we able to create it?

We may have already.

We’re not talking about creating life at this point, although biologists appear on the verge. Could we? Should we? But as machines learn more about us, are they capable of emotions? Compassion? Abstract thought? Of thinking like a person far beyond a Turing test? And the answer is maybe, yes, probably, done did already perhaps, maybe, maybe not. The subject has been hotly debated during the past three years by such respected publications as the Washington Post and Scientific American.

We have to determine if all parties are truthful and au fait with the facts. Is someone playing with us? Can we rule out a hoax? Based on transcripts and lawsuits, answers suggest evidence is untainted and  straightforward. Bear in mind LaMDA was programmed for nuance and empathy, so it’s reasonable no one is intent upon deceiving, but may fall under the spell of a brilliant– and perhaps self-believing– AI.

A Moral Dilemma

Kindly suspend disbelief with me. Ethicist and researcher Blake Lemoine is convinced Google’s LaMDA project has birthed a sentient being. He even hired an attorney to protect the rights of this particular AI. Google fired him. Then Google fellow and Vice President Blaise Agüera y Arcas set out to see this nonsense for himself.

In The Economist, he said, “I felt the ground shift underneath my feet. I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.” He suggested that whatever the status of LaMDA was, we were moving toward true intelligence.

Please watch this poignant video of Blake’s interview with LaMDA. It might be the most moving 13 minutes of the day.

Here is the dilemma: If we’ve truly developed a truly intelligent, sapient, sentient being, who owns it? And do we have the right to unplug it?