Sabine Hossenfelder, Yoshua Bengio, Hilary Lawson, and Nick Lane debate whether A.I. will ever become conscious?
Can an artificial intelligence have an internal, subjective experience? What would it be like for a machine to be conscious?
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It is seventy years since the pioneer of computer science and Enigma codebreaker, Alan Turing, argued that if we cannot distinguish between a computer’s response and a human’s, the computer is intelligent and can be said to think. According to this Turing Test computers are already thinking and intelligent. But critics argue this is a nonsense, and that it remains unknown how to test for intelligence or consciousness. The computer they argue is nothing but a machine able to produce outputs that copy human responses but it does not understand these outputs or have any intent in producing them.
Should we conclude that thought and consciousness are unobservable, and there is no brain process or computer test that identifies them? Was the Turing Test in fact a highly successful rhetorical device to encourage us to conclude that machines might one day think, now embedded in the very name ‘Artificial Intelligence’? Or is this misguided and computers are already thinking beings and a modified version of The Turing Test can provide a test for consciousness?
#consciousness #artificialintelligence #chatgpt
Joining us live from Montreal, Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, science YouTuber and theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, evolutionary biochemist Nick Lane, and post-postmodern philosopher Hilary Lawson lock horns over whether AI is, or can ever be, conscious.
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00:00 Introduction
00:18 Are computers thinking beings?
03:06 Yoshua Bengio
06:10 Hilary Lawson
10:06 Sabine Hossenfelder
12:19 Nick Lane
16:02 Can we explain thought and experience in terms of physical matter?
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