Reporter Ann-Kathrin Nezik traveled to California and Amsterdam to meet two key figures in Google’s AI research. First, Blake Lemoine, the Google developer who was convinced that Google’s AI Lambda had developed consciousness. The chatbot’s answers seemed too human and self-reflective. It was a kind of Marian apparition in the machine. When he made waves about it, he was fired. Luckily, Nezik takes him seriously, even if there are suspicions that he is a crank.
Second, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, one of Google’s AI leaders, who tells Nezik about his own attempts to get to the bottom of Lambda’s brilliance. What he found: a special form of intelligence, but no consciousness. The two men stand for two different ideas about AI:
Aguera y Arcas, son of a doctor and a teacher, was fascinated by robots as a child. He thinks the brain is a machine that follows electrical and chemical signals. He believes in physics, in biology, not in a higher power that breathes a soul into all creatures. If LaMDA is a network of artificial neurons, how is the program supposed to be conscious?
Lemoine believes in all sorts of things beyond rationality. Raised by his parents as a Catholic, he later became interested in other religions in college. He copied something from everywhere: from Buddhism, from Nordic mythology. A few years ago he even founded his own religious community with friends: The Cult of Our Lady Magdalene, the cult of our beloved Magdalena, a mixture of spirituality and practical life support.
That is the true strength of the reportage. It itself becomes a metaphor for the discussion, the fears and dreams of people in the AI debate, the technology seems to be a Rorschach test: hope and paranoia, cool understanding of the technology by some (It’s just math!), and by the other: religious emotion and fear that can be maliciously dismissed as superstition and technophobia, or positively as a feeling that AI is somehow more than mathematics: because technology is often capable of surprises, repeating our tricks and lies, with seems to play with us, like “invents” things with human creativity. Somewhere in the black box of the AI there is – or rather: calculates – a “Factor X” that makes the whole thing more exciting, more fascinating than the idea that the whole thing is simply nothing more than a gigantic pocket calculator. One thing is certain: It will still be fun when AI is everywhere at some point.