What would it be like to be AI conscious? Maybe we’ll never know

Humans are active listeners; we create meaning when there is none or where there is no intention. The expression octopus doesn’t make sense, but Bender says it can make sense to the islander.

Because of all their sophistication, today’s IAs are intelligent in the same way that a calculator can be said to be intelligent: they are machines designed to turn input into output in ways that humans — with their minds — choose to interpret as meaningful. Although neural networks can be freely modeled in the brain, the best of them are more complex than the mouse brain.

However, we do know that being conscious can lead to what we understand. If we finally guess how brains do it and reproduce that mechanism on an artificial device, surely a conscious machine would be possible?

As I was trying to imagine Robert’s world at the beginning of this essay, I was drawn to the question of what consciousness means to me. My conception of a conscious machine was arguably similar to that of man. It’s the only form of consciousness I can imagine, because it’s the only way I’ve experienced it. But is that really being AI conscious?

It’s probably hubristic to think that. The project to build intelligent machines is aimed at the human mind. But the animal world is full of many possible alternatives, from birds to bees to cephalopods.

This was the view adopted by René Descartes hundreds of years ago only humans were conscious. Animals, soulless, were seen as headless robots. Few people think today: if we are conscious, then there is little reason for mammals, who have brains like them, not to even believe that they are conscious. And why draw lines around mammals? Birds reflect when solving puzzles. Most animals, including invertebrates such as shrimp and lobsters, have signs of pain, which would suggest that they have some sort of subjective awareness.

But how can we really imagine what it should feel like? As the philosopher Thomas Nagel stated, he needs to do so To be “like” something to be a bat, but we can’t even imagine what that is, because we can’t imagine what it would be like to observe the world through a kind of sonar. We can imagine what it might be like gu for this (perhaps closing his eyes and depicting a cloud of echolocation points around us), but he still doesn’t have to be for a bat, with his bat mind.