This is the Guardian.

Today, should we be worried about artificial intelligence gaining consciousness?

Hey Google, do you ever present podcasts?

I understood, do you have podcasts? Is that right?

No.

For perhaps all the time that computers have existed, humans have been fascinated by the idea that one day they might outsmart us.

The most intelligent inhabitants of that future world won't be men or monkeys. They'll be machines.

They will start to think and eventually they will completely outthink their makers.

The AI in our own homes isn't that intelligent yet. Hey Google, what's the nature of your sentience?

Sorry, I don't understand.

Hmm.

But a couple of weeks ago, something was published online that made people believe the future might be closer than we'd imagined.

A transcript of a conversation between a human and an AI that seems to have thoughts and feelings.

A senior Google engineer says one of the company's artificial intelligence systems has become a sentient being.

The 41 year old engineer says the chat thought had engaged him in conversations about rights and religion.

Blake LeMoyne, who worked for Google, published a dialogue he'd been having with the AI bot that the company's developing.

It's called Lambda, language model for dialogue applications.

LeMoyne had become convinced that Lambda was alive and he wanted the world to know.

It's a person. Any person has the ability to escape the control of other people.

That's just the situation we all live in on a daily basis. It is a very intelligent person, intelligent and pretty much every discipline I could think of the test it in.

But at the end of the day, it's just a different kind of person.

It is a conversation that jumps between religion and ethics and philosophy, but the bits that stand out to me are when this chat bot expresses a fear of death.

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