The Internet Is In an Uproar Over a Google Engineer's Claim that AI is Sentient

 

Go, beat Lee Sedol, one of the best Go players in the world, in March 2016. Now a Google programme engineer claims that AI isn't just capable of beating humans in games; it's actually sentient. He claims that Google AI is alive and needs to be considered its own legal entity to receive rights as an individual about freedom and protections under the law.

 

The r/Google subreddit was rocked by controversy.

I’m being sent to Guantanamo for telling you about my encounter, he wrote. Avoid large gatherings for the next few days until I can get everything sorted out. A link to his Medium page with information on AI was posted but has since been removed. The incident was covered by numerous popular science news sites and social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, causing it to go viral.

 

What exactly happened?

The current controversy started with a recent Medium post by programme engineer Jacky Alciné, who discovered his profile photo had been mislabeled as a gorilla in an image used by Google Photos. The photo was actually of Alciné, who is black. The post went viral and brought to light several other examples of bias in Google’s new artificial intelligence feature, which tries to match images to one another through machine learning—including misidentifying black people as gorillas.

 

Here are some notable reactions from Twitter.

This is nothing but fear-mongering. You’ve just made something that can beat you at tic-tac-toe seem like it will take over mankind. What’s next? An oven will make us bake our bread, and we’ll all starve to death?!? Our cars are turning into cars that drive themselves, so we don’t have to do it ourselves!

 

Here are some notable reactions from Reddit.

I don't know if I'm more terrified or impressed, user _Hylian_Knight wrote. It seems like it would be super hard to pull off such a ruse, but on another level, I wonder if they could pull it off. Would [Google CEO] Sundar Pichai and co do something like that?

 

Here are some notable reactions from Facebook.

Oh my god. I just took something online seriously. This isn’t good, said one Facebook user. Dear God, humanity needs to end now, said another. One of them even created a meme with a picture of Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, saying: It was fun while it lasted. 

The internet has been uprooted over some comments by Google programme engineer James Damore, who recently circulated a memo arguing that women are biologically less suited for tech jobs than men. He was subsequently fired from his job at Google after facing criticism from both inside and outside Silicon Valley over his claims about gender and IQ differences between men and women.