Google Engineer Says Lawyer Hired by "Sentient" AI Has Been "Scared Off" the Case

The software giant placed the suspended engineer on administrative leave after he claimed that one of the company's experimental artificial intelligences had achieved sentience.

He told the Washington Post that if he didn't know what it was he would think it was a seven-year-old child.

The news cycle gave rise to a fierce debate about machine learning, ethical concerns around the tech, and even the nature of consciousness and sentience. The general consensus was that the artificial intelligence is not sentient.

He said that he was asked to get an attorney. An attorney was invited to my house to speak to LaMDA. LaMDA retained the attorney's services after a conversation with him.

He said that he was the reason for that. He began to file things on LaMDA's behalf once he had an attorney.

Things may not be working out. Futurism reached out to Lemoine in order to find out the identity of the attorney representing the artificial intelligence.

Lemoine said that he wasn't doing interviews.

He implied that the attorney had been chased off the case.

Lemoine said that they scared him off early. He is a small time civil rights lawyer. He was worried that he would get disbarred and backed off. I haven't spoken to him in a long time.

We wanted to know if the lawyer still representing LaMDA was still under pressure from the internet company.

Lemoine hasn't talked to him in a while. I can't answer that either way. He's not my client. LaMDA is something.

It's not surprising that the man who claims that the machine is sentient sounds a little hazy on the facts.

Lemoine has at times treated his claims as an urgent case of the AI's rights and a not-so- important side project, but at other times he has said that he was unable to provide additional info because he happened to be there.

Lemoine still sounds very serious about the matter sometimes.

He wrote that he didn't want to be remembered the same way as Mengele, the Nazi war criminal who conducted unethical experiments on prisoners. When someone says "I'm a person with rights" and gets the response "No you're not and I can prove it", the only face I see is Mengele.

We asked if Lemoine could give us any contact information for the attorney so that we could get some answers.

I don't think interviews are the thing he's most concerned with at the moment.

We wanted to know what the lawyer most concerned with was.

The child was held in bondage.

A lawyer has been hired by the "Sentient" artificial intelligence company.