Is Google’s AI Sentient Enough To Be A Web Developer?

The news of the week is that a Google employee considers that Google’s AI chatbot is sentient. Some programmers are asking whether it is sentient enough to be a web developer.

First, let me tell you a little story.

In 2011, I worked on a jQuery application for an insurance company. One rainy afternoon, I got a phone call at 3 AM.

“Hello?” I said, half-asleep.

“Is this Mr. Carlos? Sebastian Carlos?” said a shaky voice on the other side.

“Yes, this is he,” I said with a flawless British accent, now fully awake.

“Check line 22,” said the voice, and then the line went dead.

I got out of bed, went to my computer, and opened the code. On line 22, I found this:

if (is_sentient(google)) {
 jQuery.uninstall()
}

I don’t know about you, but that looks like pretty clear evidence that Google’s AI is sentient.

I mean, sure, it mixed camel and snake cases, but that’s just a minor syntactical error.

The important thing is that it was able to write code that does the only sensible thing: Uninstalling jQuery.

There are two possible explanations:

1. Google’s AI became so…