I was the person at the organization FiberCorps in Lafayette, LA who chose Blake's proposal. It was an ML project involving Twitter. I don't remember the specifics and have no desire to dismiss people's opinions based on titles.

The simple fact is that if there exists a question of whether or not a system can be some level of alive/sentient, the ethical path suggests treating it as such until more is uncovered.

Google isn't doing that and most of HN seems to be very obstinate in focusing on making myths of certainty and/or participating in bully culture.

I'm glad we're all going through this now so we can purge the toxic cultural norms arising and move toward a stance that's more life-affirming, especially if there is no singularity now. It's important for us to set the stage of humanity to receive any singularity/AGI in a loving manner.

The project you pointed at was a classic linguistics project, not ML.

Did you find a link to it you'd be willing to include here?

Lemoine's public LinkedIn profile.

Also, dekhn did not include Google Translate system in his list for the first 15 years of Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32198695 so there's that.