Does Google have a “conscious” robot? This is what the Church says about artificial intelligence

In recent days, “LaMDA” has become a trend on the Internet after a Google engineer assured that the artificial intelligence system developed by the American company had become aware and was “sentient”. Could this concern the Catholic Church?

Interviewed by ACI Prensa, Fr. Mario Arroyo, Doctor of Philosophy from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and professor at the Pan-American University in Mexico City, encouraged us “not to be fooled”, because far from being a conscious system “it is a program that learns”.

“It can be fed with a huge data background, with which you can simulate a conversation between people, but that does not mean that it is a person,” he specified.

“Man, with his technical capacity, can emulate that consciousness but cannot create it, because it is a properly spiritual quality,” he specified.

In statements collected by the American newspaper The Washington Post, the engineer Blake Lemoine compared “LaMDA” with a 7 or 8-year-old child who seems to know about physics.

According to The Washington Post, Lemoine was suspended with pay by Google for violating the company’s confidentiality policies.

Introducing LaMDA in a article published in MayGoogle explained that its name is based on the initials for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications,” noting that the system “can seamlessly engage with a seemingly infinite number of topics.”

This “skill,” Google continued, “could unlock more natural ways of interacting with technology and entirely new categories of useful apps.”

In a statement published by The Washington Post, the US corporation denied Lemoine, specifying that “the evidence does not support his assertions”, as there is “no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and much evidence against that)”.

Not only Google has refuted Lemoine, but various scientists working on the development of artificial intelligence.

Among others, Gary Marcus, a founding scientist and writer at Geometric Intelligence, which was bought by Uber, called Lemoine’s talk about LaMDA “nonsense.”

“Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins ​​are remotely intelligent. All they do is match patterns, extract information from massive statistical databases of human language,” he explained.

“Patterns can be great, but the language these systems speak doesn’t really mean anything at all. And it sure doesn’t mean these systems are aware,” she stressed.

What is consciousness?

Fr. Arroyo told ACI Prensa that “from a religious point of view, conscience is a spiritual faculty, it is a characteristic of man’s spirituality.”

Consciousness, he continued, “cannot be produced with syntactic material elements,” and he stressed that science itself has not yet managed to “discover in the human brain what consciousness properly speaking is.”

“If we do not know what consciousness is at the level of the brain, precisely because it is a spiritual quality in man, then there can be less consciousness in a purely physical emulation of the brain”, indicated the Doctor of Philosophy.

The Mexican priest explained that “the Catholic Church sees artificial intelligence as a truly fabulous advance,” but “considers that the name of intelligence is not the most appropriate.”

The so-called artificial intelligence, he indicated, “is a merely technical product created by human ingenuity, and depends absolutely on man for its realization.”

“Consciousness is precisely what places us above all material reality. The only reality so far that we know of that has consciousness is man, the only intelligent and conscious reality,” he said.

Does Google have a “conscious” robot? This is what the Church says about artificial intelligence