You’re probably right. I’m not too optimistic that my suggestion would make a big difference. But it might make some.
If a company were to announce tomorrow that it had built a conscious AI and would soon have it available for sale, I expect that it would prompt a bunch of experts to express their own opinions on twitter and journalists to contact a somewhat randomly chosen group of outspoken academics to get their perspective. I don’t think that there is any mechanism for people to get a sense of what experts really think, at least in the short run. That’s dangerous because it means that what they might hear would be somewhat arbitrary, possibly reflecting the opinion of overzealous or overcautious academics, and because it might lack authority, being the opinions of only a handful of people.
In my ideal scenario, there would be some neutral body, perhaps that did regular expert surveys, that journalists would think to talk to before publishing their pieces and that could give the sort of judgement I gestured to above. That judgement might show that most views on consciousness agree that the system is or isn’t conscious, or at least that there is significant room for doubt. People might still make up their minds, but they might entertain doubts longer, and such a body might provide incentives for companies to try harder to build more likely to be conscious systems.
You’re probably right. I’m not too optimistic that my suggestion would make a big difference. But it might make some.
If a company were to announce tomorrow that it had built a conscious AI and would soon have it available for sale, I expect that it would prompt a bunch of experts to express their own opinions on twitter and journalists to contact a somewhat randomly chosen group of outspoken academics to get their perspective. I don’t think that there is any mechanism for people to get a sense of what experts really think, at least in the short run. That’s dangerous because it means that what they might hear would be somewhat arbitrary, possibly reflecting the opinion of overzealous or overcautious academics, and because it might lack authority, being the opinions of only a handful of people.
In my ideal scenario, there would be some neutral body, perhaps that did regular expert surveys, that journalists would think to talk to before publishing their pieces and that could give the sort of judgement I gestured to above. That judgement might show that most views on consciousness agree that the system is or isn’t conscious, or at least that there is significant room for doubt. People might still make up their minds, but they might entertain doubts longer, and such a body might provide incentives for companies to try harder to build more likely to be conscious systems.