Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
I&#x27;m still left dumbfounded by the amount of nonsense surrounding the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness emerges from a PHYSICAL process, not from software or some trained model full of matrices of numbers. It doesn&#x27;t matter how sophisticated&#x2F;intelligent&#x2F;capable your AI model might be, there&#x27;s no reason to assume it&#x27;s conscious. There&#x27;s no evidence to suggest that any sufficiently complex system can emerge consciousness and that idea is nothing more than science fiction.<p>Consciousness in biological life is a product of evolution and natural selection. There&#x27;s big unanswered questions about how consciousness emerges in the brain, and the benefit to life (what is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness), but there&#x27;s little doubt that it is beneficial to life and that it evolved. This is evident by how much control your brain has over your conscious experience - everything you experience is the product of heavy processing in the brain. What you perceive as reality is whatever your brain tells you it is. My favorite example of this has to do with saccades [1]. This is not an &quot;accident&quot;, per se, it&#x27;s the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. How this happened is uncertain. It might be that consciousness is a natural byproduct of the neural activity in the brain. It could also be something like photosynthesis, the right set of random mutations allowed consciousness to suddenly emerge, and it has been evolving ever since.<p>The brain is often teetering on the edge of chaos, and there is evidence that this may be a mechanism for consciousness to emerge. When the brain moves away from chaos, the person generally becomes unconscious. And if the brain enters chaos, well, you have an epileptic seizure. There is also evidence that only some parts of the brain are responsible for consciousness, not all. These are evidence that imply consciousness emerges from some yet unknown physical process(es).<p>My point being, AI systems will not become conscious unless the underlying physical hardware fundamentally changes. Modern computers based on silicon chips and transistors and whatnot is most certainly not conscious, at least not in any meaningful way. If a computer does have any sort of &quot;conscious experience&quot;, it would be nothing more than like when you tune an old analog TV to a channel that doesn&#x27;t exist - random noise.<p>Maybe quantum computers or memristors have a greater chance of emerging consciousness, but without the evolutionary process to finetune the conscious experience, these systems are never going to have MEANINGFUL consciousness.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;foone&#x2F;status&#x2F;1014267515696922624" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;foone&#x2F;status&#x2F;1014267515696922624</a>