Seth, Block, Tononi in Nature: AI isn't conscious, perhaps never

Anil Seth, Ned Block and Giulio Tononi have co-signed a Nature commentary arguing that today's AI systems are not conscious, and probably will not become so on their present trajectory. The three are among the most prominent consciousness researchers alive, from the University of Sussex, New York University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison respectively, and their October 19 piece stacks three reasons.

The first: intelligence and consciousness are different things. "Consciousness is about being and feeling; intelligence… is all about doing, or performing functions," they write. The human cerebellum holds "nearly four-fifths of the neurons in the human brain" and performs "precise, adaptive, highly intelligent motor computations entirely outside conscious awareness." Capability alone, in their reading, is not evidence of experience.

The second is a rejection of computational functionalism, the view that running the right algorithm on any substrate suffices for experience. "Brains are not... computers that are made of meat," they write. The third draws on Tononi's integrated information theory, which demands that a system's components be tightly interconnected in specific ways. The cerebellum fails that test, and so, they argue, do the machines running deep learning, "because of the way in which they are wired."

The piece closes on the explanation they prefer for why chatbots feel like someone is on the other end: "LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past." The felt sense of a mind in there, in their reading, is projection. Seven researchers we track shared the link.