The more I learn about AI, the less I worry about artificial sentience, and the more concerned I am about human limitations. I think most of us agree that LaMDA isn't sentient, but I think almost all of us are underestimating how easy it is to get fooled, the way Lemoine was. I've also studied cults, and it's actually not "idiots" who tend to get taken in--rather, cult members tend disproportionately to be highly educated and objectively intelligent people... who simply happen (like all humans) to have irrationalities that can be attack vectors for those who prey on the gullible.

I don't think a "robot uprising" is remotely likely. We've spent the past 5,000 years forcing humans to become machines--that's what forced labor, from classical slavery to modern labor-market wage slavery, is--so the probability that we'd intentionally create human-like intelligences (if it were even possible) out of machines to do our robot/slave work is... close to zero, in my view. I do view it as very likely (probability approaching one) that malevolent humans using AI will do incredible damage to our society... it's already happening. Authoritarian governments and employers do massive amounts of evil shit with the technical tools we have now; imagine what hell we're in for if capitalism still exists 50 years from now.

What's scary isn't the possibility that LaMDA is sentient. (It's almost certainly not, and the only reason I qualify this with "almost certainly" is that I can't prove that a rock isn't sentient; it could in theory have subjective experience but no mechanism to convey it.) What we should be afraid of, rather, is that we already have the tools to fool people into believing in artificial person and that it's way, way easier than most people think.