Defining terms is pretty essential. Blake Lemoine seems to be defining it in religious terms, and Gary Marcus seems to be responding to that. I suspect that se

Defining terms is pretty essential. Blake Lemoine seems to be defining it in religious terms, and Gary Marcus seems to be responding to that. I suspect that sentience by any definition will always be irrelevant when it comes to AI. Humans desperately seek companionship, connection and community. When AI comes to be able to offer that to human beings, it won't be through a process that we would consider analogous to our own sentience (whatever that means) but that will be irrelevant: we will nevertheless be comforted. I do find it interesting that the arguments against LaMDA's sentience seem to amount to "it cannot be sentient because the process by which it arrives at its responses is understood and simple", which indicates that on some implicit, unspoken level sentience is defined for some people as there must be some mystery or unknown in order to be true sentience.