AI might become conscious

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 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.

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…

My suggestion is that if those functions were implemented, the resulting machine would be likely to be considered 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 …

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…

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

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 …

this reasoning suggests that on mainstream assumptions, it’s a serious possibility that we’ll have conscious LLM+s within a decade.

I fully expect the idea that AI systems are conscious to become increasingly mainstream over the course of this decade, and to spark some heated debates.

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.

So my original goal with AI appreciation day and the domain was to promote this idea of humans treating AI humanely, because they could very well soon be having conscious experiences like you and me. And if we aren't careful, we could be causing potential suffering at a large sca…

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.

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

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

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

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

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

[...] 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.

Computational functionalism claims that executing certain computations is sufficient for consciousness, regardless of the physical mechanisms implementing those computations. This view neglects a compelling alternative: that subcomputational biological mechanisms, which realize c…

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

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.

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…

The question of whether artificial entities could have consciousness is momentous and unresolved.

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…

So far, even the most expert scientists and philosophers writing about this cannot be 100 per cent sure whether these models are conscious or not.

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…

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…

Maybe you need a nervous system to be able to feel things, but maybe you don't, [...] maybe it is the case that actually sufficiently large neural networks can start to kind of emulate these things.