Here’s a copy/paste of my response from a discord chat I had in a close friend’s group from college when they asked about LAMBDA:
Okay so “sentience” is a complicated claim. In my book I discern between functional sentience and philosophical sentience. There are plenty of people who are working on functionally sentient machines - that is to say that there are machines that are aware they are a machine and have some understanding of their existence.
But the question remains: are they phenomenally sentient in the same way we are? We are sentient because we have recursive feedback from within our brains and bodies. What’s the structural difference between the organic wiring of a human and the digital wiring of a machine?
The short answer is that this will be hotly debated for decades if not centuries. Personally I believe we will one day find some quantum mechanical oddities surrounding consciousness and sentience. Namely, that you could discern whether something is “truly sentient” based upon things like quantum measurement problems. For instance, if you conduct many quantum experiments and only artificial entities observe them, do the wave functions collapse? We may never know.
But if you look at sentience and consciousness from a behavioral standpoint, we will have fully sentient machines very soon. That, however, does not mean they have phenomenal consciousness like us.
Later…
As for the discussion linked above - that’s a pretty typical reaction for people who are not well versed in philosophy, Turing tests, psychology, theory of mind, etc.
Yes, these machines can have remarkable conversations, but these people are easily fooled. It does, however, beg the question: when the machine is smarter than you, how will you know?
And THAT is the question that terrifies people, even before they know enough to ask the question
It’s also an alien intelligence, which is an unknown quantity. Humans are generally terrified of people who think differently than them, hence the anti affinity between clashing cultures. Linguistically speaking, humans are greatly comforted by people who speak like them because it implies they also think similarly. Compare that to, say, black vernacular compared to white people English.
TLDR - a Google engineer got spooked by the uncanny valley of intelligence. Nothing to see here.