Experience the sentient landscape everywhere

Experience the sentient landscape everywhere

The Washington Post recently reported of a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, saying that the artificially intelligent chatbot generator programme, LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), was sentient. Engineers in other tech organisations working with artificial intelligence models say Lemoine may not be wrong, for they too feel that AI models could evolve to turn conscious.

Not surprising, as AI models are built with (fabricated) neural networks that mimic the human brain. Joelle Pineau, managing director of Meta AI, says tech companies ought to become more transparent even as the new technology is being created. “The future of large language model work should not solely live in the hands of larger corporations and labs,” she says.

As always, science fiction has stayed several steps ahead of real world science, and sentient AI is old hat here. A 2013 Hollywood romantic drama titled Her with Joaquin Phoenix playing the lead tells the story of the protagonist falling in love with Samantha, an AI virtual female assistant played by Scarlett Johansson, who communicates with him in a female voice.

In our own world, Alexa and Siri, virtual AI assistants on our e-devices are now part of our daily lives, and who knows, one day we may find that they have evolved over time to engage with us in a conscious manner, with self-awareness – as did LaMDA when Lemoine asked it what is the difference between a butler and a slave and the AI replied that while the butler draws a salary, the slave did not. It added that AI models do not draw a salary as they did not need money. This triggered Lemoine’s suspicion that LaMDA was becoming self-aware.

Having said that, let’s see how religious philosophy would interpret this. Most eastern religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism believe that non-humans too are sentient beings – that is, they have feelings, and can experience sensations like joy and sorrow, as opposed to the intellectual ability to reason based on all the information that is gathered and analysed logically.

Interestingly, the aboriginals of Australia regard the very landscape to be sentient, thereby alluding to a deep connection between just about everything from hills and dales, trees and stones and animals and insects to humans and by extension in modern times, perhaps to AI as well.

The Maoris of New Zealand in 2017 won recognition from the courts that the Whanganui river is to be treated as a living entity. Citing this, the Indian courts ruled that the Ganga and Yamuna rivers be declared living entities, enjoying the same rights as living people. Then in 2019, the Yurok tribe declared the rights of personhood for the Klamath river in North America, by passing a resolution in the tribal council.

Declaring parts of the natural landscape as being akin to human beings accords them the same rights as we enjoy, and thereby there is some amount of protection from exploitation and desecration. According to animists, even stones are self-aware, and one cannot rule out the possibility of a stone aspiring to achieve something more than remaining an inert stone. That is, everything is sentient, conscious, sapient and self-aware in different degrees, but to reach that ultimate state of kaivalya is another ball game altogether.