Assignment
Case Study
The suspension of a Google engineer who claimed a computer chatbot he was working on had become sentient and was thinking and reasoning like a human being has put new scrutiny on the capacity of, and secrecy surrounding, the world of artificial intelligence (Al).
Lemoine, an engineer for Google's responsible Al organization, described the system he has been working on since last fall as sentient, with a perception of, and ability to express thoughts and feelings that was equivalent to a human child.
"If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I'd think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics," Lemoine, 41, told the Washington Post.
The engineer compiled a transcript of the conversations, in which at one point he asks the Al system what it is afraid of.
"I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is," LaMDA replied to Lemoine.
"It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot "
In another exchange, Lemoine asks LaMDA what the system wanted people to know about
"I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person. The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times," it replied.
News Snippets from The Guardian, June 2022
Task
1. You are a software engineer in Google working on their Deep Learning Neural Network. You made the discovery that a chatbot program might be sentient. Briefly explain how you would confirm that this chatbot program has human-like intelligence.
2. The program has expressed its wish to have a human-like experience in the outside world. Describe TWO Al technologies that can provide the program a human-like experience.
3. The United States government is very wary of this recent development and fear the computer programs' capabilities. You are asked to write a report that list FOUR ways a malicious program can use Al technologies to harm humans.