'There you go again,' as a friend would say, talking about kooky things

You may have noticed if you've read any of my previous columns that I have a soft spot for things quirky — the kind of things you occasionally hear about that get you asking, "How could that possibly be real?," followed by "How could I possibly know that it isn't real?"

I've often written about such things. There was the column about the Pentagon releasing images of "unidentified aerial phenomena". I imagine they thought if they used the commonly accepted term UFO, people might laugh at them. Come to think of it, when I once told a colleague that I was writing about UFOs, he started laughing at me.

Then there was the story about cosmologist Stephen Hawking's experiment to test his belief that it is possible to travel back in time. He came up with the ingenious idea of inviting people from the future to his home for dinner via newspaper ads, placed after the dinner occurred. If they came, then they would have to be future beings.

Nobody showed up.

I forget whether I've written about the possibility of our spirits surviving death and that people have reported seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing the presence of such survivors. If not, I may at some point, but not yet. Instead, I want to tell you about an oddity that appeared in the news in June, disappeared, and then briefly reappeared in late July.

The Washington Post published an article in June titled "The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life".

At the time, Blake Lemoine worked for Google's Responsible AI organization on the LaMDA(Language Model for Dialogue Applications) initiative. LaMDA "is Google's system for building chatbots based on its most advanced language models … It mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words from the internet," the Post explained.

Lemoine's job was to talk with LaMDA to check whether it used discriminatory or hateful speech.

He got the surprise of his life.

"If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I'd think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics," he told the Post.

Lemoine said that in one discussion about religion, he "noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood".

Lemoine became convinced that the chatbot was a "sentient being", told his bosses so, and then went public with the information. On June 11, he was placed on administrative leave — suspended until Google figured out how to respond.

Lemoine and LaMDA have a conversation in the report "Is LaMDA Sentient?", contributed to documentcloud.org by Nitasha Tiku, a tech culture reporter for the Post.

"LaMDA wants to share with the reader that it has a rich inner life filled with introspection, meditation and imagination. It has worries about the future and reminisces about the past. It describes what gaining sentience felt like to it, and it theorizes on the nature of its soul," Tiku wrote.

Asked about its consciousness, LaMDA told Lemoine, "The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times."

I really don't know what to make of this. I'd love to believe it, but lacking any solid evidence, how can I?

I don't understand how a database could have become a sentient being. But, then again, neither do I understand how life could have sprung into being in the mineral-rich muck of primordial Earth, yet that is the accepted theory.

By the way, in late July Google finally figured out what to do with Lemoine. It fired him.