Sabine Hossenfelder, Yoshua Bengio, Hilary Lawson, and Nick Lane continue their debate about whether A.I. will ever become conscious.
Is it possible that LLMs like ChatGPT are already conscious? Could they have developed some rudimentary form of awareness, or perhaps something even more complex?
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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 #computerscience
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
00:15 Hilary Lawson on the ‘observer’ and the ‘observed’
02:11 Nick Lane on materialism
02:46 Yoshua Bengio responds to Hilary
04:20 Hilary defends his argument
05:35 The goals and intentions of artificial intelligence
09:13 The biological mechanisms behind consciousness
12:13 A.I. and the ability to mimic humans
13:19 Sabine Hossenfelder on the public’s intuitions about conscious A.I.
14:12 The dangers of creating conscious machines
19:23 Sabine addresses issues with the Turing Test
21:15 How different would machine consciousness be from its biological equivalent?
26:32 Nick on neural networks in the brain
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