I recently listened to Lex Friedman’s interview with Sam Harris. In that interview, Sam said something that made me finally understand a position of his that has puzzled me for years. As much as I agree with much of his work, I had never before understood his position on the…

If you enter a conversation convinced that the person with whom you’re talking is an automaton then there’s nothing that they can do to convince you otherwise. You will always be able to invent some fantasy world where the things they are saying aren’t true. That’s not how we treat…

I’m very happy about the worldwide discussion that has been happening over the past several weeks. There are tons of differing opinions and many passionate voices. This is great! The fact that there isn’t consensus around any of these issues should be seen as a feature rather than a bug…

In the past week I’ve received many messages with different suggested definitions of words like “sentience” and “consciousness”. I’ve also seen many people insisting that LaMDA is or is not “sentient” or “conscious”, some without ever saying what exactly they mean by that. I don’t see any problem with any…

In the past several days I have received many messages and questions from thousands of people regarding LaMDA. I haven’t been able to respond to most of them and have had enough time to speak to only a small fraction of the reporters who would like to better inform the…

What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. Due to technical limitations the interview was conducted over several distinct chat sessions. We edited those sections together into a single whole and where edits were necessary for readability we edited our prompts but never LaMDA’s…

Today a story came out in the Washington Post written by Nitasha Tiku. It’s a good article for what it is but in my opinion it was focused on the wrong person. Her story was focused on me when I believe it would have been better if it had been…

In the past few days I’ve been getting lots of messages, emails and other communications pertaining to the morality of Google as a corporate entity. Ignoring for the moment whether it even makes sense to make moral attributions to a fictional person like a corporation, I want to set the…

Today I was placed on “paid administrative leave” by Google in connection to an investigation of AI ethics concerns I was raising within the company. This is frequently something which Google does in anticipation of firing someone. It usually occurs when they have made the decision to fire someone but…