There’s been a lot of debate on whether AI can be conscious or not, and whether that might be good or bad.
What concerns me though is that we have yet to uncover what consciousness even is, and why we are conscious in the first place.
I feel that if there is a state inbetween being sentient and sophont, that AI may very well reach it without us knowing and that there could be unpredictable ramifications.
Of course, the possibility of AI helping us uncover these very things should not be disregarded in of itself, but it should ideall not come at a cost.
Max Tegmark mentions consciousness in his recent podcast with Lex Fridman. The idea that recurrent neural networks might be conscious (as opposed to the current architecture of LLMs—linear feedforward transformers) is intriguing. But whether it helps with AI Safety is another matter. The consciousness is highly likely to be very alien. And could be full of suffering as much as it is happy—and if the former, a massive threat to us. Also it seems highly unethical to experiment with creating digital consciousness, given the risk of creating enormous amounts of suffering.
There’s been a lot of debate on whether AI can be conscious or not, and whether that might be good or bad.
What concerns me though is that we have yet to uncover what consciousness even is, and why we are conscious in the first place.
I feel that if there is a state inbetween being sentient and sophont, that AI may very well reach it without us knowing and that there could be unpredictable ramifications.
Of course, the possibility of AI helping us uncover these very things should not be disregarded in of itself, but it should ideall not come at a cost.
Max Tegmark mentions consciousness in his recent podcast with Lex Fridman. The idea that recurrent neural networks might be conscious (as opposed to the current architecture of LLMs—linear feedforward transformers) is intriguing. But whether it helps with AI Safety is another matter. The consciousness is highly likely to be very alien. And could be full of suffering as much as it is happy—and if the former, a massive threat to us. Also it seems highly unethical to experiment with creating digital consciousness, given the risk of creating enormous amounts of suffering.