Is There a Way That a Spreadsheet Could Become Sensitive?

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Lamda is a neural network that works in the way you've described. Could something like that ever become sentient? I mean, if it's essentially just a really advanced auto-complete. In some ways, we could even go all the way back to the narcissus myth,. which is that we can be very seduced by things that look or sound like us.

Last week an engineer at Google claimed that an AI chatbot he worked with, known as LaMDA, had become ‘sentient’. Blake Lemoine published a transcript of his conversations with LaMDA that included responses about having feelings and fearing death. But could it really be conscious? AI researcher and author Kate Crawford speaks to Ian Sample about how LaMDA actually works, and why we shouldn’t worry about the inner life of software – for now.. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod