In 1969 I was in Grenoble, France. The plan was to create an interactive programming version of a new programming language ( Algol 68 ). Of course, my future held nothing of the kind, but a clever idea connects the 23-year-old hot-shot to the 75-year-old armchair philosopher and a young guy with a 2022 vision that is strangely related. At this time, interactive access to a computer was a new thing. In 1975, Bill Gates wrote an interactive BASIC version that launched his career in 1978.  Oops*. I was excited by the possibilities. At one time, "soon" (it turned out to be half a century), everyone would have access to the "Spirit System." Soon, all human knowledge would be "online." The main thing that excited me was the ability for people to share projects online, even creating music. My "field" at the time was "Artificial Intelligence," so it was easy to imagine an "app" that would impersonate a real person. Specifically, we w...

 In this post, I summarize some of the conclusions that come out of the LamBDA issue controversy. To find out what LamBDA actually is, check here .  This post deals with the current controversy, which is whether "LamBDA" or any similar creation can be "sentient." Spoiler alert: noting we are doing now places us on the road to creating a sentient machine. A sentient computer would be like a sentient book. Computers talk to us like books, TV, and phones talk to us.  Talking computers descend from centuries of effort that have given us talking parrots. When we see intelligent words coming out of a computer, our natural instinct is to attribute sentience to the computer. We will get over it, just as we got over our amazement at words coming from the first telephone.  Or a parrot. Under normal circumstances, I use words to cause mental events in your mind. This depends on both understanding the language and having a reasonably similar experience of life. In this way, lan...

  Here are some links to the subject: a deep dive into how natural language "bots." As a long-time student of Artificial Intelligence, I have a sense that I am rolling up my sleeves to understand something totally new. My interest in the subject came from Blake Lemoine's essay.

  Here is information on the firing of Lemoine and Google's story, which took a few weeks to cook up. Check here for in-depth information on Lemoine, which has a certain odor of being created by Lemoine himself. Was he actually "famous" before the Lambda affair? As it stands now, Lemoine is guaranteed a media spotlight and a place in any debate about machine intelligence. It is fair to say that this is quite deliberate on Lemone's part. So then, how much of all this is Lemoine's self-promotion and how much can we say about "LamBDA" which is, at the very least, shorthand for something cobbled together at Google that includes the LambBDA conversational engine plus God knows what else? God and Google, you might say, but neither of them is talking. Blake's account of how ethics has unravelled at Google is here . On the issue of what LamBDA is, exactly, Blake offers some useful insight here .  The following extract is particularly revealing: Over the co...