Digested week: London’s dialect gets around, like Hampshire wheelie bins | Esther Addley

The machines are growing sentient, waste collection empires are expanding, but don't worry, Paddington still has the power

Oh good - computers are sentient now. Great to start the week with an extra shove of momentum on the kamikaze death-plunge that is modern life. To recap: Google has suspended an AI engineer after he released extracts from a conversation he had with the company's chatbot development system, known as LaMDA. So far so customer service queue. However, the engineer claimed the conversation showed the bot had become sentient and was actually a person.