Wired essay: skip AI consciousness debate, treat models as alive
TL;DR
- A new Wired essay argues that whether AI is conscious matters less than the fact that current models already behave like agents in the world.
- The author opens by declining a Galápagos cruise on consciousness funded by a Russian entrepreneur who made his fortune running dating sites.
- The piece treats the 2022 launch of ChatGPT as the moment AI consciousness stopped being a purely academic problem.
A new Wired essay opens with the writer turning down an invitation to a Galápagos cruise: a floating seminar with about a dozen philosophers of consciousness, bankrolled, per the piece, by "a Russian philosophy enthusiast who made hundreds of millions of dollars running dating sites."
The refusal is the setup. The author traces the puzzle back to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am," then argues the debate stopped being academic once ChatGPT arrived. In the essay's words, "in 2022, ChatGPT gave voice to AI, and subsequent, more powerful models have confounded even their creators." Two experts in our Who's Who directory shared the piece the day it went up.
The whole pitch sits in the subtitle: "While philosophers ponder AI consciousness, the models have ideas of their own." Whether the systems clear the philosophical bar for sentience is being overtaken, the essay argues, by what they are already doing.
Shared on Bluesky by 2 AI experts
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app: I hoped that at some point responsible pubs would stop doing this. Alas… →
Originally reported by wired.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Who Cares if AI Is Conscious—It’s Basically Alive