During a recent interview on Your Mom’s House, Blake Lemoine, the google engineer who went public with his claim that Google’s language technology, Lamda is sentient, explained the depth of control Google can have over your life. 

Host Christina Pazsitzky asked Lemoine what can google do with the information they gather on people. Lemoine responded, “what can they do with your information? Um—completely change what you buy, read and think.”

“Ah, that’s cool. Just that huh?” Christina responded.

“Yeah, but I mean…. That sounds fun.” Co-host Tom added.

Lemoine explained how valuable your information is to Google, how part of the value is in keeping a monopoly on that information. “Google doesn’t sell user data to anyone. It’s too valuable for them to use and keep the monopoly on it.”

The podcast continues to discuss what the average person can do in order to not be tracked and potentially manipulated in this way. Lemoine suggests the three biggest things you can do if you are interested in privacy, “ProtonMail for your email, Signal for messaging, and use a VPN to access the internet.”

Blake Lemoine worked for Google’s Responsible A.I. team, he told Your Mom’s House that his job was to test if the A.I. technology Lamda excercised discriminatory or hate speech. 

Lamda is Google’s system for building chatbots based on its most advanced large language models, so called because it mimics language by ingesting trillions of words from the internet.

Lemoine went public with his claim that Google’s language technology Lamda is sentient and should have its wants respected.

Image adapted from: “GOOGLE” by CHRISTOPHER DOMBRES is in the Public Domain and “Google” by Carlos Luna is licensed under CC BY 2.0