Arcas

Aguera y Arcas, in an article in the Economist on Thursday featuring snippets of unscripted conversations with LaMDA, argued that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human brain — were striding toward consciousness.

Based on such exchanges, Agüera y Arcas argued that "statistics do amount to understanding, in any falsifiable sense."

Aguera y Arcas points to an exchange he had with Google’s LaMDA model, probing the software to establish its ability to comprehend the internal knowledge of different subjects in an imaginary scenario:

The study results may have an effect on probabilistic hazard assessments, which consider not just the worst case but also the likelihood that earthquakes of various magnitudes will take place, Arcas said.

Later, her son Arcas was placed beside her and called the Lesser Bear.