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Jimmy Aiken, senior policies, Catholic answers. Thanks for doing focus with us.

May my pleasure.

I'm focusing on today.

Artificial intelligence.

Okay.

And I know this is one you have focused on before and you know a good deal about, but it became news when

an employee of Google suggested or made public statements to the fact that whatever that Google is cooking up in the lab is already self-aware is already showing signs of being alive.

Yeah.

Or sapient anyway.

And the employee's name was Blake LeMoin and he's an interesting guy. He's he's a Christian and he's also a software developer.

He was working on the on its official name is the language model for dialogue applications, which is abbreviated to lambda and essentially lambda is a chatbot.

It's a it's a application it's an application that you can talk to through typing and it will type back responses.

It uses a model of software that's based on human neurons. So it has what's called a neuronal network.

It doesn't have biological neurons like we do in our brains, but instead it has software that imitates the function of several million neurons.

And so once they set up the neuronal architecture for the chatbot, they then trained it by having it go over vast quantities of human dialogue and also stories written by humans.

And and that enables it to be able to simulate actual conversations and LeMoin was in the process of verifying that it wouldn't like say racist things.

And there's a very specific reason why they wanted to make sure it wouldn't say racist things so and we can talk about that because it's a funny story.

But but in the process of talking with it, he became convinced that it is sentient to the level of a seven or eight year old child and that it's therefore a person and needs to be accorded human rights.

And when Lambda asked him to hire, well, they put him on administrative leave, but then Lambda asked him to hire an attorney to protect its rights.

And he did so and at that point they fired him. They also said, sorry, sorry, this thing is not actually sentient.

But what I didn't know the lawyer part, get me a lawyer, I would think, yeah, that might be the first sign of sentience in our society, get me a lawyer. So so many issues there, the of first of all, I think the issue, there's a basic issue of knowing, how would you know if you're dealing with a real person or not, if you make these things complicated enough.

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