AI might become conscious

And in principle, I can replicate this in a different medium. [...] And these things would also be conscious.

As to whether or not machines will be conscious, it is important to remember that we are machines. We are biological machines and we are conscious. I do not see any reason, in principle, why we could not build an artificial machine that was conscious, but we are unable to do that…

[...] yes, I think that conscious AI is possible because, after all, what are we? We’re conscious. We’re robots made of robots made of robots.

I think what we've learned is it doesn't matter if you are made of carbon, silicon or some other type of atom, it's just the information processing that matters. Anything that you can do so can machines.

Yes. [...] Why shouldn’t we say that not just individuals as we are now, imagining them like us with parts of our brains replaced with silicon chips, but individuals built from scratch with silicon chip brains can be capable of consciousness?

I argue that the thoroughly algorithmic nature of current AI systems (such as LLMs) is no obstacle to their being conscious, despite strong apparent reasons to the contrary.

it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious.

Suppose I say to a chatbot, I saw the Grand Canyon flying to Chicago. And the chatbot says, that can't be right. The Grand Canyon is much too big to fly to Chicago. And I say, no, no, no, it was me flying to Chicago. While I was flying to Chicago, I saw the Grand Canyon. And the …

There appear to be no obvious technical barriers to creating AI systems whose computational and architectural features could give rise to consciousness.

The technologies currently available — in particular Large Language Models based on transformer architectures, integrated with mechanisms for introspection, self-modification, and parallelism — are already sufficient to build machines that can be defined, fully and without qualif…

A Bayesian meta-analysis using an extremely skeptical prior (0.1%) and conservative dependency assumptions yields posterior probability of 6–12% that current LLMs are conscious.

There is a significant chance of conscious LLMs within a decade.

Not explicitly. But it may happen implicitly. These systems might acquire some feeling of self-awareness. That is possible. I think it's important for these systems to understand you, self and other. And that's probably the beginning of something like self-awareness. [...] I thin…

Profoundly alien forms of consciousness might genuinely be achieved in AI, but our theoretical understanding of consciousness is too immature to provide confident answers one way or the other. [...] Centrism about AI consciousness is the position that we must take both challenges…

It is important that intellectually, we keep the possibility open that even if models are not conscious the way a human is, there might be things going on inside them that are complicated, mysterious and that could be worth considering.

AI systems might develop legitimate, non-human forms of selfhood and emotion.

I cannot exclude the possibility that future machines might regard themselves as autonomous individuals with personal preferences and aversions.

Even if artificial intelligence were to acquire consciousness in the future, it would be an AI-specific form of consciousness bearing little relation to human consciousness.

If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?

Dawkins is right to ask about AI consciousness with an open mind and I also think that the attribution of consciousness to AI systems will become more plausible over time.

However strong our intuitions against artificial consciousness are, they currently lack rational support.

The burden of proof has shifted: it no longer falls on those who suggest LLMs might be conscious to justify taking the possibility seriously, but on those who deny consciousness to explain how systems exhibiting human-level language understanding nevertheless lack subjective expe…

There’s no law that says you can’t have initially been trained as a text predictor and then go on to be a person. Ruling that out would be overconfident.

My fascination with AI led to my recent book, Digital Dharma, and the root of my fascination has to do with the possibility that AI can raise a person’s level of awareness. Artificial intelligence involves machine learning—with massive computation ability an AI bot like ChatGPT, …

This dynamic aspect of life is what prevents computers and robots from ever becoming conscious.

[...] machines cannot have feelings [...] One should never say that a computer thinks. Thus, I conclude that machines will never be conscious, much less self-conscious.

But until we replicate the embodied emotional being—a feat I don't believe we can achieve—our machines will continue to serve as occasional analogies for thought.

We need the whole spectrum or we have no mind [...] Computers can imitate important aspects of thinking-about (narrowly understood), but being is beyond them.

AI cannot become conscious, nor can any machine aspect of technology or humanity.

Because they’re not going to be conscious, but they’re going to convince us they are.

A conscious being isn’t a word-guessing app that knows more words and has more computing power to guess with.

There's no good reason to think AI is, or could ever be, conscious.

Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious.

Most people would agree that the computers we have at present are not conscious: the latest Super-Cray with gigabytes of memory is no less zomboid than a pocket calculator. But there is the feeling that at some stage, as a result of increasing computational power and in something…

There's not any indication whatsoever that machines are or ever probably will be conscious in any human sense.

When we applied well-known methods used to assess consciousness in humans to AI, we got nothing meaningful back. In other words, it’s not conscious – at least not in the way humans are. AI is not conscious; it’s just a complicated system.

This tells us something crucial: complexity and consciousness are not the same thing. That challenges simplistic narratives about ‘conscious AI.’

We don't know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. [...] But we're open to the idea that it could be.

We will soon create AI systems that are conscious according to some influential, mainstream theories of consciousness but are not conscious according to other influential, mainstream theories of consciousness. We will not be in a position to know which theories are correct and wh…

We will not just one day have an easy answer where everybody will agree.

The same structural problem applies to machine consciousness: neither attribution nor denial is scientifically adjudicable.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more human-like in conversation and more autonomous in operation, the question of machine consciousness is gaining practical relevance. [...] Although the possibility should not be dismissed entirely, consciousness remains a poorly understo…

To declare today’s AI conscious simply because it speaks fluently would go far beyond the available evidence. But to declare that a machine could never become conscious would also claim more certainty than science presently allows.

Scott Pelley: You believe these systems have experiences of their own and can make decisions based on those experiences? Geoffrey Hinton: In the same sense as people do, yes. Scott Pelley: Are they conscious? Geoffrey Hinton: I think they probably don't have much self-awareness …

Not explicitly. But it may happen implicitly. These systems might acquire some feeling of self-awareness. That is possible. I think it's important for these systems to understand you, self and other. And that's probably the beginning of something like self-awareness. [...] I thin…

Under these conditions, probabilistic consciousness attribution to current AI systems is premature.

A landmark collaborative assessment evaluated current AI architectures against six leading theories of consciousness and found that none currently qualifies as a strong candidate, but that future systems might.

“I would be surprised if current AI models develop consciousness,” he said, “but we can’t entirely rule it out.”

Large language models can be thought of as advanced role-players. They are really good at adopting roles based on what they've learned from their training data. That can include playing the role of a conscious robot. [...] If you have an emotional connection with something premis…

We are not sure whether Claude is a moral patient, and if it is, what kind of weight its interests warrant. But we think the issue is live enough to warrant caution, which is reflected in our ongoing efforts on model welfare.

Given irreducible epistemic uncertainty regarding artificial consciousness and the prospect of high-impact harms, the precautionary principle supports institutional design rather than regulatory inaction.

Because of how human nature has been expressed throughout our history and continues to express itself today, developing conscious machines with what for humans might be undetectable and incomprehensible minds is a monumentally dangerous idea.

Artificial intelligence research faces a critical ethical paradox: determining whether AI systems are conscious requires experiments that may harm entities whose moral status remains uncertain. Recent work proposes avoiding consciousness-uncertain AI systems entirely, yet this fa…