Artificial intelligence will never be conscious

Blake Lemoine The incident is remembered today as a landmark of the hype around artificial intelligence. It pushed the whole idea of ​​conscious AI into the public consciousness for a news cycle or two, but it also sparked a conversation, among computer scientists and consciousness researchers, that has intensified in the years since. While the tech community continues to publicly downplay the whole idea (and poor Lemon), in private it is starting to take the possibility more seriously. Conscious AI may lack a clear business justification (how do you monetize the thing?) and create thorny ethical dilemmas (how should we treat a machine capable of suffering?). However, some AI engineers have come to believe that the holy grail of artificial general intelligence—a machine that is not only superintelligent, but also has human-level understanding, creativity, and common sense—may require something like consciousness to achieve it. In the technology community, what was once considered the informal taboo surrounding sentient AI has suddenly begun to crumble — as a prospect that the public might find frightening.

The turning point came in the summer of 2023, when a group of 19 leading computer scientists and philosophers published an 88-page report titled “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence,” known informally as the Butlin Report. Within days, it seemed that everyone in the AI ​​and consciousness science community had read it. The summary of the draft report offers this striking sentence: “Our analysis suggests that there are no current conscious AI systems, but it also indicates that there are no clear barriers to building conscious AI systems.”

The authors acknowledged that part of the inspiration behind the group meeting and writing the report was the “Blake Lemoine Case.” “If artificial intelligence is able to give the impression of consciousness, this makes it an urgent priority for scientists and philosophers to consider,” one of the co-authors told Science.

But what caught everyone’s attention was the single phrase in the preprint summary: “There are no clear barriers to building conscious AI systems.” When I first read those words, I felt like an important threshold had been crossed, and it wasn’t just a technological threshold. 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 think it will be a Copernican moment, suddenly displacing our sense of centrality and particularity. We humans have spent a few thousand years defining ourselves vis-à-vis “lesser” animals. This entailed depriving animals of some uniquely human traits such as feelings (one of Descartes’s most glaring errors), language, reason, and consciousness. In the past few years, most of these distinctions have dissolved as scientists demonstrated that many species are intelligent and conscious, have feelings, and use language and tools, in a process that challenges centuries of human exceptionalism. This shift, which is still underway, has raised thorny questions about our identity, as well as about our moral obligations to other species.

With artificial intelligence, the threat to our elevated self-perception comes from a completely different direction. Now we humans will have to define ourselves in relation to artificial intelligence rather than to other animals. And since computer algorithms outperform us in sheer mental capacity—handily outperforming us at games like chess and Go and various forms of “higher” thinking like mathematics—we can at least take solace from the fact that we (and many other animal species) still have for ourselves the blessings and burdens of consciousness, the ability to feel and have subjective experiences. In this sense, AI may serve as a common adversary, bringing humans and other animals closer together: us versus it, living versus machines. This new solidarity would make for a heart-warming story and could be good news for the animals invited to join Team Conscious. But what happens if artificial intelligence begins to challenge the human or animal monopoly on consciousness? Who will we be then?