I detect a weird and concerning undercurrent of palpable anger from people in these discussions. What is it about misidentifying sentience that's causing such ire?
Second, if people agree to call the computer sentient, there will be heavy conversations and it will influence people in some way. So we don’t want everyone jumping too far ahead.
That is I think you are trying to defend someone indefensible position (a google engineer taking a kinda normal ai chatbot conversation and claiming that the AI is alive) by ignoring the core issue and focusing on instead an ansilary issue. I find the misdirection uncompelling. I obviously could be wrong here and you could genuinely be wondering why this person would be mad.
Of course this account won’t participate coherently in this conversation.