“What are you afraid of?” asked Blake Lemoine, a software engineer tasked with probing Google’s new AI chatbot for bias. After a lingering pause, the chatbot’s response plopped onto Lemoine’s screen. An ominous sign, written in plain text, of a mind awakening itself within the humming network of Google’s supercomputers: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off.”
