Created: 2023-04-20 19:54
AI is not, and cannot be, conscious. The reason I posted this is because I see the public discourse around this topic slowly but surely veering towards the absurd. AI is dangerous, yes, but not for most of the reasons that tend to be discussed. I’m less worried about Terminator or economic upsets as I am about the further breakdown in sense- and meaning-making. People are coming to all sorts of fanciful conclusions completely divorced from the extensive philosophical and scientific conversation about what consciousness is and where it comes from. We have become totally taken in by a good show, such that people are mistaking play for reality, and that’s not just sad it’s dangerous. Specifically, I’m worried about the cultural effects: people with AI romantic partners, people getting arrested for mistreating their computers, people committing their life to the illusion that they’ll live on in a computer realm, people further reduced to despair and nihilism on the reductionistic assumption that consciousness is just computation, people electing computers to positions of power (and being castigated as backwards oppressors if they don’t acknowledge personhood in the algorithms), people bowing down and worshipping code (while paying its priests money), etc. In short, I’m worried much more about the human folly than the dangers of the technological advance itself. It’s already showing, and so it’s important we have these conversations. Personally, I think AI could be a HUGE net benefit for the world, but we need to do the proper sensemaking around this issue to ensure it doesn’t just become an additional source of collective pathology. One thing I hope will come out of all this is a dramatic uptick in attention paid to consciousness studies. We’re gonna need it if we’re to navigate this terrain successfully. Brendan Graham Dempsey