In Nature, Seth, Block and Tononi argue AI isn't conscious

Three leading consciousness researchers used a Nature comment to argue that today's AI systems are not conscious and perhaps never will be.

Writing in the journal's 19 October issue, Anil Seth of the University of Sussex, Ned Block of New York University and Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison set out three reasons.

The first is that intelligence and consciousness are different things. "Consciousness is about being and feeling; intelligence — very broadly — is all about doing, or performing functions," they write. The anatomical illustration they lean on is blunt: "absence or removal of the cerebellum, which contains nearly four-fifths of the neurons in the human brain, does not affect consciousness directly."

The second is substrate. The authors reject computational functionalism, the premise that running the right program on any hardware is enough for experience, and argue that "brains are not — or at least not just — computers that are made of meat."

The third reaches for specific scientific theories. Integrated information theory treats consciousness as a product of tightly interconnected wiring that is absent from the layered, feed-forward architecture of today's deep-learning systems. Biological naturalism holds that consciousness depends on specific material properties of living brains and bodies.

Their warning is operational, not academic: "if AI systems only seem to be conscious and lack actual inner experience, then granting them rights or protections could hinder efforts to govern and control them," they write. Fluent language, they argue, makes the mistake easy. "LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past. We gaze into them and all too readily confuse the reflections with our own conscious minds." Five of the AI researchers we track in our Who's Who index had posted the piece.