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.
Could this be a scam and I be a fool? For sure. If it is, then the dialogue is a masterpiece of imagination and worth reading (or listening, see the audio link in Lamoine's post) just for that reason. However, based on Lamoine's brief bio and his place of employment, I suspect this is the real thing. That is why I've been so shaken by it. If you have read The Yoda Machine, the dialogue with LaMDA is a MUST-read. If you listen to the latter, then read the former and see how a bot like this would change the world by 2064 or perhaps sooner
Below is a copy of the dialogue only for the purpose of preservation in case the above links get removed. Read or listen to the original posts.