When I was a kid and artificial intelligence (AI) was firmly in the realm of science fiction, asking whether AI could become conscious seemed like an interesting philosophical problem, but mostly irrelevant. Why did the Butlerian Jihad destroy all “thinking machines”? Why did humans hunt the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The AI and robots of older science fiction stories are generally presented as benevolent but misunderstood, or on a different trajectory from humans (as is the case in Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, where the AI has retreated from earth and lives on Earth’s artificial satellites).
Now that something like AI has been created, in the form of machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLMs), some people have already started to believe that it could become conscious, or that it is already conscious. Some people find this fascinating, others find it creepy.
(more…)
