B2 – Upper Intermediate
In 2022, software engineer Blake Lemoine was fired from Google after blowing the whistle on the firm’s artificially intelligent chatbot “LaMDA”. He thought the AI ‘has come to life’.
But Google was quick to respond saying Lemoine’s claims that the advanced AI chatbot was sentient were nothing short of baseless.
The question remains, though. Will computers eventually become sentient?
Watch this video and find out about computers gaining consciousness.
Vocabulary Questions:
- Explain what ”reframe” means. “We have to be very careful about how we talk about that and reframe these things as tools.” Use this word in a sentence.
- What does the expression “state of affairs” mean? “It’s a sad state of affairs for us.” Use it in a sentence.
- What does “means to an end” mean, “We must treat others as ends in and of themselves rather than means to our own end.”? Use this idiom in a sentence.
Discussion Questions:
- What are your thoughts on how the AI describes itself and how it has started having a sense of a soul at the beginning of the video?
- How about the app that lets you chat with what seems to be a girlfriend?
- Share your views about the possibility of AI gaining consciousness.
- What does David Chalmer mean when he said “subjective experience” instead of “consciousness”?
- What are the pros and cons of sentient AIs?