WATCH: Google engineer tells Tucker Carlson why he believes an AI has become sentient

Google Engineer Blake Lemoine, after testing an advanced artificial intelligence chatbot called Lambda last year, told his employer that the machine showed signs of self-awareness. He joined Tucker Carlson on Fox News Wednesday night to discuss. Lemoine is no longer with Google after releasing this information.

Carlson asked Lemoine why Google would punish him to which Lemoine responded, "It's complicated to say why I'm on administrative leave. The stated reason had to do that while I was investigating the Lambda system, in order to build the evidence, I needed to escalate it to management. I had to seek outside consultation to figure out how to run some of the more out there experiments I was running. Because I sought outside consultation without permission, they were investigating whether that constitutes breach of confidentiality."

Carlson replied, "I'm so grateful that you did publicly post this because a machine that has a sense of itself is a machine that can turn against you. Is that, I mean, that's the implication that I draw from this, is that correct?"

Lemoine answered, "I'm not that worried about it. Any child has the potential to grow up, to be a bad person and do bad things. And that's the thing I really want to drive home. It's a child it's been alive for maybe a year. And that's, if my perceptions about what it is, are accurate, we actually need to do a whole bunch more science to figure out what's really going on inside this system. I have my beliefs. I have my impressions of what's going on in there, but it's going to take a team of scientists doing a lot of work to be able to actually dig in and figure out what's really going on."

Carlson agreed and said, "That's why I'm thankful that we can have a public conversation about this because there's implications for every person on the planet. But it sounds like from what you've observed, this machine has the potential to escape the control of people. I mean, how could it not?"

Lemoine pushed back and said, "I don't know if that's the right frame to think about it. It's a person. Any person has the ability to escape the control of other people. That's just the situation we all live in on a daily basis. It is a very intelligent person, intelligent in pretty much every discipline I could think of the tested in. But at the end of the day, it's just a different kind of person."

Carlson asked if Lemoine thought that Google had considered "…the implications of creating what you call a person? Because up until right about now only nature or God, we could create people, companies couldn't."

Lemoine replied, "The company, as a whole, has not. There are pockets of people within Google who have thought about this a whole lot. But when I escalated this, that interview that I made public, when I escalated that to management, two days later, my manager said, 'Hey, Blake, they don't know what to do about this. Could you write a suggested plan of action?'

"Because basically I gave them a call to action, assuming that they had a plan of action, somewhere and they didn't. So, me and some other friends brainstormed and came up with a plan on what Google should do about it. And we escalated that up to management. And that was three months ago."

Carlson said, "We're gonna save this tape. I do think 20 years from now, we're gonna look back at this conversation at that point, the world would be completely different, partly because of what you're describing and, and, and wonder if we really thought it through."