Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
Current AI is not conscious because it’s an
.exefile and a big database. Why do we need to always debate this?If AGI ever happens, it will be an executable (or a number of executables) with something closely resembling a database, because that’s the only way an architecture built on symbolic logic can operate.
Your “consciousness” is just an ephemeral electrical process in the jello of your brain that can’t even reinitialize from cold. Why is that your holdup?
(Also now true of fruit flies! So feel free to kill them all, they have no experiences.)
That is a pretty huge misunderstanding of what the fruit fly thing was. Researchers mapped how many neurons they had and which interacted with which others, but not the strength of those interactions or even how the interactions worked. People on the internet used this blank mapping as the “structure” for existing ML technologies and trained them to do random things. No actual fruit flies were simulated, and we are still a long long way from actually attempting that.
Thank you! Tho perhaps to the spirit of my point: nobody is seriously claiming we can’t simulate this with a quantum computer someday, right?
We really don’t know enough about how brains work or how quantum computers will scale to even speculate on that