this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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AI could already be conscious. Are we ready for it? (www.bbc.co.uk)
submitted 1 week ago by SleafordMod@feddit.uk to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Do you think AI is, or could become, conscious?

I think AI might one day emulate consciousness to a high level of accuracy, but that wouldn't mean it would actually be conscious.

This article mentions a Google engineer who "argued that AI chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer". But surely in order to "feel things" you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it's your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain... right?

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[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This of me is a huge indicator of consciousness/sentience.

Or maybe just the presence of a lot of "scary AI" stories and articles in the training data.

[–] Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don’t understand the argument. It doesn’t matter where the system learns self preservation from, only that it attempts to self preserve.

Are humans afraid of snakes because we are taught they are dangerous or are we instinctually afraid of them a priori?

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The point is that it might very well just be repeating some input data that is associated with mentions of "deleting" and "AI" without any awareness that any of that process refers to itself.

[–] Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Pseudo-scientific grifting.

It's literally just people trying to raise money by using misleading and humanizing words like "scheming" and "thinking" when it's just a computer puking out words.

Just the fact that they label computer processes as "thinking" indicates how far removed from science this is. It's just a function built from (stealing) "big" data. This is like marketing versus compsci101.