Category: Lezione di inglese

Google Fires AI Engineer Who Claimed Its AI Was Sentient

Artificial Intelligence is nothing new, but recently one of Google’s AI Engineers claimed that its AI was sentient, after claiming to have a conversation with it about “being unplugged.” Google maintains that its AI is not sentient, but this engineer was not the first person to be removed from Google for concerns over its AI.

Watch the video and then do the accompanying English language exercises on our website.

The news is a consistent source of entertainment, knowledge and discovery that never ceases to exist and always comes out with more and more material each day. Because it plays such a vital part in our lives and is so important to keep up with, it is without a doubt a piece of your everyday routine that can’t go ignored.

Whether it is to understand the ramifications of recent legislation passed, to hear about recent events and grasp the potential consequences to your country, or simply hear about what is happening in other countries in order to compare them to what’s happening in yours, the news is certainly a staple in our lives and the most consistent way to get information.

This is why Scrambled Eggs has decided to unite two of your biggest worlds: learning English and keeping up with what is happening in the world. We hope our challenging daily exercises, composed of listening, vocabulary and comprehension exercises in English, will satisfy both of those above worlds in a satisfactory and also entertaining way.

So enough about introductions, let’s get to today’s Learn English with the News topic:

Adapted from this article.

Google Fires AI Engineer Who Claimed Its AI Was Sentient | Definition Match

Put the following words to the correct definitions.

Google Fires AI Engineer Who Claimed Its AI Was Sentient | Fill in the Black

Fill in the blanks with the correct words.

Google Fires AI Engineer Who Claimed Its AI Was Sentient | True or False

Decide if the statements are true or false.

And that’s it for today’s English lesson, where you can improve your English with the news and current events. Do you have any comments or special requests for us for the next edition of Learn English with the News? Be sure to leave any feedback you have in the comments section below. We would love to help you on your quest to learn the English language!

For other Learn English with the News segments, be sure to check out the rest of our posts:

https://scrambledeggsinglese.it/tag/learn-english-with-the-news/

Full text:

Google has fired the software engineer who claimed an unreleased AI system had become sentient, saying he violated employment and data security policies. The engineer stated a conversation technology called LaMDA had reached a level of consciousness after exchanging thousands of messages with it.

Google confirmed it had first put the engineer on leave in June. The company said it dismissed the “wholly unfounded” claims only after reviewing them extensively, Google said it takes AI development “very seriously” and is committed to “responsible innovation.”

Google is a leader in innovating AI technology, which includes LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications.” Technology like this responds to written prompts by finding patterns and predicting sequences of words from large swaths of text—and the results can be disturbing for humans.

“What sort of things are you afraid of?” the engineer asked LaMDA, to which LaMDA replied: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others […] It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.”

But the wider AI community has held that LaMDA is not near a level of consciousness. “Nobody should think auto-complete, even on steroids, is conscious,” the founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence says.

It isn’t the first time Google has faced internal strife over its foray into AI. In December 2020, another employee, a pioneer in the ethics of AI, parted ways with Google. A third employee, a leader of Google’s Ethical AI team, was fired in early 2021 after her outspokenness regarding the previous employee. The two had raised concerns over AI technology, saying they warned Google people could believe the technology is sentient.

Adjectives to Describe People

Welcome to the Scrambled Eggs blog! Here you can find many different resources with which you can learn English. There are listening exercises, grammar exercises, vocabulary boosters and all kind of interesting articles on a variety of topics! Leaning English should be fun, so we hope you like what you see and hear.

We know learning new vocabulary is always fun, especially when you can use the words to talk about the people you love…and the ones you don’t! This is why we have created the following exercises to help you learn and remember some new adjectives that can be used in a wide variety of situations, for example:

“Hey Tom, why are you late to the meeting?”
“I’m sorry, my neighbour saw me leaving my house this morning and decided to tell me about her new cat. She is very chatty and I couldn’t get away!”

Or you could even talk about the teacher you hated in high school.

“Hey look! Mr. Thomas, your old science teacher is over there.”
“Not Mr. Thomas, he was the worst teacher ever! He was always so uptight and never let us have any fun in class.”

Now it is your turn to practice using these interesting adjectives!

Adjectives Exercise

Fill in the gaps with the words below.

 

We hope that helped you learn a little English today! If you’d like to improve even more, check out the rest of our

resources (https://scrambledeggsinglese.it/english-exercises/), take a look at our Instagram or drop by our English school in Milan.

 

5 Links to learn numbers for Kids

Numbers can be quite confusing for children when they first start learning English, here are five useful links to get them started.

The numbers category on this game is a very good starting point as they will listen and read different numbers.

https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/fast-english/

After some practice, monster numbers can be good as they will need to think a little faster.

https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/numbers/

A fun interactive counting game:

How Many – Counting Game 

Here is a great video to learn numbers from 1 – 10 which includes lots of nursery rhymes and is interesting for children.

 

Help George count and find his animal friends in hide and seek:

https://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/busyday/hideseek/

There are many little things you could do at home to help your children learn numbers in English. Start by asking them how many things we need. For example, at dinner time you could ask: how many forks do we need? Or how many chips are on your plate? When you are out in the streets you could ask: How many red cars do you see? Or how many bicycles do you see? All these questions not only teach them how to use numbers but help them learn new words too. Hearing parents speak English will also give them a little boost of confidence in trying out the language.

We hope that helped you learn a little English today! If you’d like to improve even more, check out the rest of our resources (https://scrambledeggsinglese.it/english-exercises/ ), take a look at our Instagram or drop by our English school in Milan.