AI Will Never Be Conscious
WIRED • • entertainment
Key Points:
- The Blake Lemoine incident highlighted public interest in conscious AI, prompting serious private consideration of the possibility among AI engineers despite public skepticism, as conscious AI could be key to achieving true artificial general intelligence.
- The 2023 Butlin report by 19 scientists and philosophers stated that no current AI is conscious but suggested no obvious barriers exist to building conscious AI, sparking debate about the implications for humanity’s identity and moral obligations.
- The report's assumption of computational functionalism—that consciousness is a software running on hardware like a brain or computer—is controversial, as critics argue that brains and computers differ fundamentally in structure and function, challenging the report’s conclusions.
- The proposed standards for detecting AI consciousness rely on unproven theories and computational models that
