Then: Google fired Blake Lemoine for saying AIs are sentient
Now: Geoffrey Hinton, the #1 most cited AI scientist, quits Google & says AIs are sentient
That makes 2 of the 3 most cited scientists:
- Ilya Sutskever (#3) said they may be (Andrej Karpathy agreed)
- Yoshua Bengio (#2) has not opined on this to my knowledge? Anyone know?
Also, ALL 3 of the most cited AI scientists are very concerned about AI extinction risk.
ALL 3 switched from working on AI capabilities to AI safety.
Anyone who still dismisses this as “silly sci-fi” is insulting the most eminent scientists of this field.
Anyway, brace yourselves… the Overton Window on AI sentience/consciousness/self-awareness is about to blow open>
“quits google saying ai is sentient” has big “quitting the new york times and saying you’re cancelled” vibes
Extremely good take, especially with what has come out about google’s workplace culture.