Toyama: Google’s AI isn’t sentient– but human-like intelligence is possible

After a Google engineer announced that one of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot projects achieved sentience, the internet erupted with disbelief. The engineer was put on leave, and many scoffed at his claims. 

But that doesn’t mean AI isn’t smart. Lifewire interviewed University of Michigan School of Information professor Kentaro Toyama about the sentient claims for AI technology. Toyama said that while a chatbot almost certainly doesn’t have the ability to experience feelings and sensations, it can still display intelligence. 

“Today's technology is certainly within the range of human-like intelligence," he says, adding that the engineer probably made a common mistake of equating intelligence with consciousness. 

Toyama says those are two different things. “Six-month-old babies probably have conscious experience but aren’t intelligent,” he says. “Conversely, today’s chess software is intelligent — they can handily beat the world’s best human players — but they can’t feel pain.”

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Read “No, Google’s AI Isn’t Self-Aware, Experts Say,” on lifewire.com.

Learn more about professor Kentaro Toyama.