In the summer of 2022 Blake Lemoine, an engineer, posted to Medium a transcript of his conversation with LaMDA, a chatbot in development that Google had hired him to troubleshoot. Lemoine’s post made headlines because of its incredible claims: the engineer declared LaMDA “sentient” and even suggested that it had a “soul”. At the time Lemoine’s assertions were met with incredulity and disbelief, but several months later, following the public unveiling of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Lemoine’s pronouncements no longer seemed so wild. ChatGPT can speak fluidly and coherently much of the time, approximating human speech. It can express opinions and write passable student essays. There is even evidence it is capable of some form of spontaneous self-correction, a widely recognised hallmark of human intelligence among philosophers of mind.
Have we finally built a machine that can think? The history of philosophy throws up a potential roadblock on the much-trumpeted march of AI towards human-like intellect. Such challenges are nothing new; in 1972 Hubert Dreyfus published What Computers Can’t Do, a landmark book that drew on Wittgenstein and Heidegger to show that AI research at the time misunderstood what intelligence is. But another improbable protagonist – the 19th-century German philosopher GWF Hegel – goes beyond these attempts, despite having lived and died over 100 years earlier. Hegel developed an explosive account of the relationship between life and mind that overcomes the limitations of Dreyfus’s “critique of artificial reason” and furnishes a new yardstick against which any purported AI must be measured.
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