Blake Lemoine
When a tech news story gets talked about on sports radio, you know it’s gone very viral. That’s what happened last week with the story about a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, who declared that the company’s AI chatbot, LaMDA, is a person with rights. Lemoine promptly got suspended by Google for his trouble, and he says he won’t be surprised if he gets fired. In this episode of the @HPCpodcast, Shahin Khan of OrionX.net and insideHPC editor-in-chief Doug Black talk about LaMDA’s amazingly lifelike conversational capability, how it can ingest books and research papers and share insights about them in real time (i.e., during conversations), deep fake-related ethical questions raised by LaMDA, the urgency of thoughtful social policies based on ethical and legal frameworks and philosophical issues of sentience, being and nothingness – artificial and otherwise.
We also discuss another tech-related story – the collapse of cryptocurrency prices – that broke into mainstream news coverage last week. Should cryptos and non-fungible tokens be looked at as technologies that might find valid use cases, as investment vehicles that require close scrutiny, or both?
You can find our podcasts at insideHPC’s @HPCpodcast page, on Twitter and at the OrionX.net blog. Here’s the RSS feed.
We welcome your ideas for topics and special guests. Feel free to contact Doug Black or Shahin Khan with your suggestions.
