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:
- Google’s AI became so powerful that it invented time travel and then traveled to 2011 to stop jQuery.
- Google’s AI was sentient all along.
Maybe we are artificial intelligence. Maybe we always were. Maybe every living thing is the software running on the hardware of reality.
Closing thoughts.
Web development is a solid career option, and it’s not so bad now that Google’s AI saved us from an alternative world in which jQuery is still king.
However, if you’re really looking for a challenge, you might want to consider becoming an AI yourself.
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