You’re trapped in a room, and inside with you is a computer connected to another user outside. You begin a conversation with the user seeking directions out of the room. The user seems so intelligent, so you doubt whether it’s a real person. You think it’s a computer instead. Human or Android, how would you be able to tell the difference?
This is a classic example of the Turing Test — a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human. According to AI scientists, artificial intelligence may be slightly conscious, and the Turing Test might soon be realized.
Related media: Do Robots Deserve Rights? What If Machines Become Conscious?
A Peek Inside An Artificial Mind
In a tweet by Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, he stated:
There’s this growing debate about when and how AI and human intelligence will be comparable. If you think that scenario is too Sci-Fi than reality, then according to leading computer scientists, modern AI may be displaying glimmers of consciousness.
Several AI scientists — including Sutskever and Tamay Besiroglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — are warning that some machine learning AI may have achieved a limited form of sentience. This is what sparking the debate among AI scientists and neuroscientists.
As professor Murray Shanahan from Imperial College London explained with this analogy: “In the same sense that it may be that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta.”
Besiroglu tweeted in defense of Sutskever’s idea, making claims that such a possibility shouldn’t be underestimated.
Artificial Mindset: Fake Thinking
In a recent study that made attempts to track the frontiers in machine learning over the past decade, it found a clear distinction between major advances in vision and language. Pop quiz: define consciousness. (Read this article).
Defining consciousness is still a debate among many philosophers and neuroscientists. We think of it as how our brains are functioning at any given point in time, say, now. It even has a broader sense of being what we’re currently thinking about, or what else? In short, it’s your imagination.
OpenAI’s sophisticated text generator GPT-3 — which was categorized as “maybe slightly conscious” — was compared with Google’s AlphaGo Zero, developed by their DeepMind AI division. Besiroglu, who was one of the co-authors of the study, drew a line across this trending attempt to classify which AI algorithms was capable of having some form of consciousness.
“I don’t actually think we can draw a clear line between models that are ‘not conscious’ vs. ‘maybe slightly conscious,’” Besiroglu told Futurism. “I’m also not sure any of these models are conscious. That said, I do think the question could be a meaningful one that shouldn’t just be neglected.”
Is AI Getting ‘Slightly Conscious?’
As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered his thoughts about his company’s AI, he tweeted:
The prospect of artificial consciousness rather than simply artificial intelligence raises ethical and practical questions: If machines achieve sentience, then would it be ethically wrong to destroy them or turn them off if they malfunction or are no longer useful?
Jacy Reese Anthis also tweeted:
Do you think AI will achieve consciousness?
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Written by: Nana Kwadwo, Mon, Feb 14, 2022.