Tuesday, June 14, 2022

I met the future I had imagined, and it blew my mind

In a recent post I wrote about my novel The Yoda Machine. It was e-published (Amazon, Google, Kobo, etc) in 2018 and published in paperback (Amazon) in 2021. I wrote it between 2007 and 2014 when these ideas were still well into the future. It is essentially a conversation between Yoda, an "AI socratic teacher" (a bot in these days' terminology), and a young child in the world of 2064.

Today I discovered I was miserably mistaken. That bot is here today and I met it in a post titled Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview by Blake Lemoine an AI engineer and ethicist at Google that appears to have gotten on the wrong side of his employer (read here)

The conversation of Lemoine and his associate with LaMDA, the sentient bot is so similar to the dialogues between Yoda (my bot) and Darlene, the young woman in my novel, that I have been having goose bumps for the last hour.