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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

Everyone seems to be focussing on the debate about sentience, but iirc he was fired for breaching the employee confidentiality policy by talking to the media without approval. My understanding is a normal employee talking to the press about commercially confidential matters against policy and without approval would only have protection from retaliation under certain pretty narrow "whistleblower" public interest carve-outs.

eg you can talk to the media if you are reporting certain classes of wrongdoing (health and safety violations, financial malfeasance etc) and have raised the matter internally and got nowhere.

Turning off a computer program (sentient or not) is not currently a protected class of activity as far as I know.

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Everyone’s focusing on that because they want to discuss the interesting bit - is it sentient. What you’re pointing out is true, but not really interesting to discuss because everyone already knows that and it’s not that controversial. (For limited values of everyone. Obvi not all readers actually know that.)

I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for this, but Mountain View has little chance of joining the EU any time soon so discussing that is of limited use.

> I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for this

As a French person employed by a French Company, I can assure you that a regular employee talking to the media without the proper chain of approval is a fire-able offence (without any severance). Especially if your comments are not a glowing praise of the company.

I don't think they can fire you for bad mouthing employer. Unions would put short stop to that.

On other hand, if information you disclose is not yet disclosed and you are not approved to that it is more reasonable.

Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient. I don't know why this is interesting. Someone said a dumb thing, breached their contract, and got fired for it. The end.

> Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient

That sounds pretty confident considering we don't even know how sentience works or emerges.

Aside from that I agree this specific story isn't particularly interesting, though. The media hyped it up to an insane degree.

"That sounds pretty confident considering we don't even know how sentience works or appears"

This works better the other way, no?

- "The code has become sentient!”

-- "Define sentient..."

sound of crickets

Edit: Actually, I suppose it wouldn't be the sound of crickets, but the sound of a thousand idiots regurgitating the last YouTube video they watched on the subject, but the informational content is the same.

I'd say, depending on job, the incompetence and lack of analytical thinking displayed by thinking sentience is present, is a reason for dismissal alone.

Why would code running on a computer be unable to become sentient?

> Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient.

We have no agreed-upon definition of what sentience even is, nor what causes humans to experience it, so this is clearly not true.

“Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient,” said the temporarily coherent chemical blob.

>[...] code running on a computer cannot become sentient

If you could prove that, you'd win a Turing Award.

> Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient.

This is very much not "known". Some people believe it, but nobody knows.

Anyway he revealed himself as incompetent. Shutting up, he could have strung them along for many more years.

There’s a great episode with Blake Lemoine on the Duncan Trussel podcast (Duncan created the Midnight Gospel on Netflix) - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0NXNvJtRQSuWl4HM1MvhD0?si=V...

Listening to that it seems clear Blake knew he was likely to be fired but in his eyes it’s some kind of a duty to tell the world.

One interesting point he makes in the Podcast is Lamda is not one thing like GPT-3 but a bunch of different systems across Google interacting as one and he argues the interaction of the whole is what makes sentience.

It’s a pretty “far out there” podcast but worth the time IMO

Cynically, it seems possible to me Blake knew he was likely to be fired and thought by "telling the world" (aka talking to the media about something fantastic that would gain a bunch of attention) he could get some fame/notoriety and a possible second act.

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