More so than simple awareness, sentience can be defined as the ability to feel feelings, to be moved and driven by those feelings and, importantly, to be aware of others and their feelings. It’s possible that LaMDA met that last criterion (it seemed to know that it was speaking to a specific Google engineer), but whether it’s able to feel emotions is contested, to say the least. LaMDA was only doing what it was taught to do, make calculations to put a sequence of words together to form a response. Besides, it’s not the only AI of its kind with these types of capabilities.

Right now, the most-talked-about piece of technological innovation that is poised to transform our lives is the autonomous or self-driving car. As self-driving cars gain widespread adoption, analysts are predicting the rise of what is known as the passenger economy — a term coined by Intel — that is expected to be worth $7 trillion by 2050 as validated in a new report by analyst firm Strategy Analytics.

To say that almost no one uses encyclopedias any more would be an exaggeration. According to the website Alexa, which tracks and ranks sites based on daily visitors and page views, U.S. traffic to britannica.com ranks it at 2,240 on the list of sites, beating the pants off worldbook.com, which comes in around 68,000. Both those brands are ghost towns compared to Wikipedia, which is ranked sixth.

For the record the Google search yielded 513,000 results in 0.27 seconds. That's a lot of Maya Angelou to choose from even for the most Angelou-ignorant. Once when a legend died, the problem was what to say if you hated him. But to have an opinion, good or bad, about a legendary literary figure you had to read her. Now for instant and innocuous insight you can just Google her. Once you faked sorrow. Now you fake familiarity.

In the past few months, a mounting number of small but substantial protests have taken place within the United States. They have emerged in opposition to various legislative and governmental efforts to obtain ex-post facto permissions to engage in expansive domestic spying and employ unfettered authority of detention, search, and extraordinary rendition against U.S. citizens. In particular, political dissidents, activists, whistleblowers, and otherwise “threatening” entities have been the focus of these initiatives, as well as the loudest voices of protest against these punitive forces. 

 Indian Americans are the most educated population in the United States, with more than 80 percent holding college or advanced degrees, stated a report released in June by the Pew Research Center. Indians Americans also have the highest income levels, earning $65,000 per year with a median household income of $88,000, far higher than the U.S. household average of 49,000, according to the survey.