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.

Here’s what, I believe, neither Huxley, nor Orwell, nor any of us saw coming: It’s not a matter of government using technology to enslave the people. It is a matter of technology using the government to harness people’s loyalties, monies, and energies. It is about the creation of a vast, quiet sea of smiling economic slaves. Technology has proven itself more of a powerfully uniting force than government. The Trump/Never Trump divide is real and is full of unforgivable (and unforgiven) vitriol that promises to last into the next decade.

Climate change. Creationism versus evolution. Deep space travel. Tesla electric cars. These are just a few buzzwords that have been repeatedly popping up in current news over the last few years. What ties them all together is that they’re science-related. From literature and entertainment to advertising and education, it seems as if science, and the appreciation of science, is entering a social renaissance in the 21^st century. 

The odds of humans being dealt the medical equivalent of a royal flush—eliminating disease and slowing or stopping the aging process—may not be as long as we’ve been made to believe, according to scientists.Some futurists think even more radical changes are in the offing: That humans will be able to use technology to solve “the problem of dying.”How did humans go from living an average of 35 years two centuries ago to contemplating living a century or more?

While drones have played an increasingly prominent role in America’s military and surveillance operations – at home and abroad – lesser known is the growing use of this new technology in civilian life. Some of these applications are far less sinister than one might expect. For Jason Lam, owner of San Francisco’s first personal drone shop, the aerial crafts could just be the latest and most exciting wave in the field of digital photography. 

The real issue is whether the framework of the century-old patent laws, which served as the basis for the San Jose decision, has outlived its essential usefulness for inspiring innovation. The essential process of this involves building upon and improving the works of others. This was precisely the real genius of the late Steve Jobs as he converted the touch-screen computer from a colossal flop to a mainstream consumer device and invented smartphones on the basis of ideas that he couldn’t claim to be his and his alone.

India has not had any problems producing a birthrate to support the world’s second-most populous nation. They have a highly educated workforce. Anyone, from anywhere, that has needed tech support knows their telecommunications infrastructure works. They are creating their own products to meet the growing material demands of Indian citizens.  Since the turn of the century, India has become a hotbed for computing innovations. First, they assisted American companies to avoid any Y2K complications. Today, Indian technology entrepreneurs are creating intellectual property to compete on the global market.

When a friend forwarded me Pico Iyer’s recent New York Times essay, “The Joy of Quiet,” I was squashed in the back of a Maruti shuttle van on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass of Kolkata....The honking din of traffic around me was deafening. The construction happening on the bypass added its grating groan to the general bedlam. The Maruti rattled and creaked, the FM radio non-stop hits swelling and garbling with each bump on the road. Every single person in the shuttle was shouting into their cell phone. I wanted them all to stop, take a deep breath and read what Iyer had to say.

So you’re a Luddite. Technology overwhelms you, and you reject it. You desire a world without all the nagging bells and whistles, tubes and wires of technology, a poetic “noble savage” existence in harmony with nature.The profusion of technology in the last 40 years has never been more brilliant, but that light reveals some starkly opposed visions.