Earlier this year, Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made headlines for a particularly outlandish claim: After engaging in conversation with a highly sophisticated algorithm named LaMDA, he decided that the AI was in fact a sentient being, and as a result it deserved legal personhood. Since Lemoine made this claim, Google has fired him , and almost everyone has concluded that he is clearly wrong , but this clearly-wrong claim nonetheless launched a barrage of articles, many with the premise “Yes, but what if he wasn’t?” Attention to this case isn’t surprising: A century of science fiction should be enough...