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Are you aware of Google’s Chatbot software LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications)? It is a sophisticated AI-language Model designed by Google.
A senior software engineer at Google named Blake Lemoine posted a long piece of his interaction with this bot here on Medium. I found it to be super intriguing, not in a “robots are gonna take over the world one-day” kind of a way, but in a more philosophical sense.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, the interaction between the engineer and the “robot” was about how the robot felt sentient. The engineer, when asking the robot about its understanding of the nature of its existence using a Zen koan: A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.” This is what the robot had to say —
Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.”
Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror.
