For decades, hopeful techies have been promising a world where absolutely every object you encounter—bandages, bottles, bananas—will have some kind of smarts thanks to supercheap programmable plastic processors.

To be clear, current artificial intelligence systems are decades away from being able to experience feelings and, in fact, may never do so.

The fact that LaMDA in particular has been the center of attention is, frankly, a little quaint. LaMDA is a dialogue agent. The purpose of dialogue agents is to convince you that you are talking with a person.