Tech: Updated AI Will Never Be Conscious
The Blake Lemoine incident is remembered today as a high‑water mark of AI hype. It thrust the whole idea of conscious AI into public awareness for a news cycle or two, but it also launched a conversation, among both computer scientists and consciousness researchers, that has only intensified in the years since. While the tech community continues to publicly belittle the whole idea (and poor Lemoine), in private it has begun to take the possibility much more seriously. A conscious AI might lack a clear commercial rationale (how do you monetize the thing?) and create sticky moral dilemmas (how should we treat a machine capable of suffering?). Yet some AI engineers have come to think that the holy grail of artificial general intelligence—a machine that is not only supersmart but also endowed with a human level of understanding, creativity, and common sense—might require something like consciousness to attain. In the tech community, what had been an informal taboo surrounding conscious AI—as a prospect that the public would find creepy—suddenly began to crumble.
The turning point came in the summer of 2023, when a group of 19 leading computer scientists and philosophers posted an 88‑page report titled “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence,” informally known as the Butlin report. Within days, it seemed, everyone in the AI and consciousness science community had read it. The draft report’s abstract offered this arresting sentence: “Our analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious, but also suggests that there are no obvious barriers to building conscious AI systems.”
The authors acknowledged that part of the inspiration behind convening the group and writing the report was “the case of Blake Lemoine.” “If AIs can give the impression of consciousness,” a coauthor told Science magazine, “that makes it an urgent priority for scientists and philosophers to weigh in.”
But what caught everyone’s attention was that single statement in the abstract of the preprint: “no obvious barriers to building conscious AI systems.” When I read those words for the first time, I felt like some important threshold had been crossed, and it was not just a technological one. No, this had to do with our very identity as a species.
What would it mean for humanity to discover one day in the not‑so‑distant future that a fully conscious machine had come into the world? I’m guessing it would be a Copernican moment, abruptly dislodging our sense of centrality and specialne
Source: Wired
