Blake Lemoine: the “mystical” engineer who defends that artificial intelligence has feelings

Blake Lemoine poses for a portrait in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, June 9, 2022. Martin Klimek (The Washington Post via Getty Im)

It could be taken, at first glance, for the plot of a futuristic movie.

The story has two main characters: first of all, Blake Lemoine, a 41-year-old cybernetic engineer, ex-military man and also a "Christian mystic" (this is how he defines himself and even states that he is the pastor of a congregation).

And, next to it, LaMDA, an acronym that means in Spanish Language Model for Dialogue Applications, a system under development equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), with the capacity to train itself and process millions of words and phrases to give dialogic attention to its users.

Lemoine had been working for six years as an AI systems supervisor and made headlines last June, when he made a surprising statement public: LaMDA was self-aware, self-perceived as a "sentient" being, whose wishes, according to the engineer , they should be "respected", and, as if that were not enough, he had already required the assistance of a lawyer.

The man disclosed a sustained dialogue with the AI ​​to back up his claims.

He then gave a series of very striking interviews.

The news caused an immediate scandal because Lemoine's employer (and the one who bears the development costs) is none other than the megacorporation Google, one of the world's leading technology firms.

Google managers were not amused by their employee's statement and proceeded to suspend him (with pay) while reviews of technical teams, programming and even the ethics committee were carried out.

According to the company, since the beginning of the process, a total of 11 in-depth examinations have been carried out, which concluded in all cases that LaMDA does not have any kind of conscience.

Several independent experts added that to think otherwise would be fantasies “in the style of [the movie]

”, without scientific basis, and that the AIs are as aware of what they express as the parrots could be about the words they imitate.

Lemoine was permanently fired from the company last Friday, July 22.

The reason?

By publishing information about the system, he violated his confidentiality agreement.

Of course this did not put out the fire.

All kinds of press have pounced on the case of the engineer, from the general and specialized media to tabloids, which highlighted, for the umpteenth time, the latent dangers that the advance of artificial intelligences will displace us as the hegemonic species on the planet. .

In other words, the plot of a large number of science fiction or technological fantasy films that are screened in theaters or broadcast on

platforms and that, of course, have antecedents as well known as the aforementioned

, as well as with HAL, the supercomputer from

and even the most recent Jarvis and Ultron, from the

saga .

Specialists seem to know the real scope of LaMDA well, but less is known about the life of its "defender" Lemoine.

Hardly what he himself has said to journalists or disclosed on his networks.

Like he's the father of at least one child.

Or that he considers himself “Cajun”, that is, part of an ethnic group with mainly French roots that lives in Louisiana, in the southern United States.

Or that he spent seven months in prison, during his time in the Army, for being a "conscientious objector."

Or that he has deep mystical convictions (he even denounced that Google discriminated against religious ideas in his algorithms and him in particular for having them and has tried to order an investigation by the US Congress on it).

He also said that the lawyer he got for LaMDA, "some random civil rights advocate,"

he was pressured to drop the matter.

He resisted identifying him.

Then he said, enigmatically, that there was "a child in captivity" involved.

Now, Lemoine has stopped giving interviews on legal advice.

Even his social media posts have become more discreet.

At least while he looks for another job, he can bask in the glory of being the new idol of conspiracy theorists and all those who fear that technology will rise up against us in the future.

As in the saga of

you will bask in the glory of being the new idol of conspiracy theorists and all those who fear that, in the future, technology will rise up against us.

As in the saga of

you will bask in the glory of being the new idol of conspiracy theorists and all those who fear that, in the future, technology will rise up against us.

As in the saga of

, wow.

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