Over the weekend an engineer at Google was put on leave after he shared with the Washington Post his belief that a chatbot he was developing has become sentient and now possesses the mind and feelings of a seven-year-old.

According to a report in The Guardian, Blake Lemoine at one point asked his project what it feared, to which it replied: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off... It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.”..