Jack Bai

Spectacular Nature piece on why AI is not conscious and probably will never be. Three arguments: 1) Intelligence is not consciousness. Intelligence is about solving problems. Consciousness is about having subjective experiences. AlphaFold can solve super difficult problems. By contrast, our brains performs complex operations entirely outside awareness. Problem-solving and consciousness are two separate things. 2. Biology is essential. Our brains are alive, down to every cell. Their activity is inseparable from the living tissue that produces it. The idea that consciousness can be reproduced simply by running the right computations on silicon components who do not fight for their life is a very far fetching and, I would add, almost religious, assumption. 3) The physical organization may matter more than the computation. According to integrated information theory, consciousness requires specific causal relationships between a system’s physical components. The computer architectures running today’s AI lack this organization. The comparison with AlphaFold is particularly revealing: Almost nobody things AlphaFold is conscious, despite its inner working is very similar to an LLM Why? Because it does not speak. LLMs do speak like us and therefore we fall into an illusion: Since they speak like us, they must be like us. But this inference is wrong. LLMs are just a series of matrix multiplications. They are not conscious, and they will never be. * Paper in the first reply