Seth, Block and Tononi say silicon AI unlikely to be conscious

Three heavyweight consciousness researchers, Anil Seth, Ned Block and Giulio Tononi, argue in a Nature comment published 19 October that machine consciousness is "extraordinarily unlikely, at least in the digital, silicon-based systems that underpin today's technologies." Seven researchers in our Who's Who tracker have passed the piece along since.

Their first reason separates intelligence from consciousness. The human cerebellum holds nearly four-fifths of the brain's neurons yet performs "precise, adaptive, highly intelligent motor computations entirely outside conscious awareness." Doing is not feeling. "Consciousness is about being and feeling; intelligence…is all about doing, or performing functions," the authors write.

The second reason rejects computational functionalism, the view that running the right program on any substrate yields consciousness. The authors blame projection for inflated LLM attributions. "LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past," they argue, noting that almost nobody attributes consciousness to AlphaFold despite comparable computational sophistication, because it does not chat.

The third reason comes from Tononi's integrated information theory, which requires a system's components to be "wired together in very specific, tightly interconnected ways" that the layered, feed-forward architecture of today's deep-learning systems does not have.

The authors close by weighing policy stakes: when consciousness is uncertain, they argue the costlier mistake is attributing it where none exists rather than missing it where it is.