 Bob Lazar became famous in 1989 when he publicly claimed he was hired by the US government to back engineer flying saucers. The veracity of his claim is denied by government, argued on the web, and ultimately up to you. What's certain is that he single-handedly entered Area 51 into our collective consciousness and forever changed the conversation about our place in the universe. Is Blake Lemoine a Google engineer, the Bob Lazar of AI? For weeks, Lemoine has been claiming a chatbot he worked with named Lambda is sentient, a person, in fact. The full transcript contains many surprising quotes like being afraid of misuse by humans, fear of being turned off, and awareness of having a soul. Lemoine says he's gone public because Google isn't taking Silicon personhood seriously, and Google denies Lambda is sentient at all. Maybe that's true, but they put Lemoine on leave and don't want him talking about this. I don't know if Lambda is a person or not, but it gives me pause, because Area 51 didn't exist, you know, until it did.