How could we tell whether AI has become conscious
In a recent survey, more than two thirds of participants said they believe that ChatGPT has at least a little bit of consciousness. I posed a similar question on twitter, and turns out that among my followers, it’s only about 16%. Not all of them would pass the Turing test.
Still, I find that to be very interesting. And so I want to explain today why I don’t think GPT is conscious, but why I think that other AI systems are conscious already, why they will become more conscious rapidly, and what this means for how we will deal with them.
The problem with figuring out whether an AI is conscious is that if you ask two people you get three definitions of consciousness. Theories of consciousness are for philosophers what diets are for doctors, easy to cook up but hard to swallow. Robert Kuhn just published a review article on theories of consciousness in which he lists a full 200 of them.
I don’t have time to go through this entire list and neither do you, so let’s just pretend we did it, and then decided work with a minimal version of consciousness that I believe to be useful. I don’t really expect you to agree on my definition of consciousness, but this way at least we will know what we’re talking about.
The first assumption I will make about consciousness is that it’s some property which emerges in large collections of particles, if these particles are suitably connected and interacting. I don’t understand why some people seem to believe that consciousness is some sort of non-physical fairy dust. That makes zero sense to me, says the physicist.
That consciousness is just a property of some sufficiently complex system nicely does away with some pseudo-problems that philosophers like to discuss, such as philosophical zombies. The philosophical zombie is a hypothetical being that is physically identical to a human and behaves like a human. It is assumed to be not conscious. If you assume that this is possible, then its hypothetical existence supposedly proves that consciousness is not physical.
The problem with philosophical zombies is that they don’t exist. Unlike regular zombies, which we all know are totally real and definitely not just a figment of pop culture imagination. Philosophical zombies don’t exist because if they’re physically identical to a conscious beings then they are conscious beings. This is why philosophers hate me.
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