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How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious

27 points by dnetesn 8y ago

laszlokorte 8y ago
I feel like the argument is circular: Only conscious beings can ask questions. So no matter what specific question the AI asks, we would only recognize it as real question by already assuming consciousness. A labeled text field in a form or a speach synthesized sound is not really the computer asking a question but just part of the interface that has been designed.
paulddraper 8y ago
"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
raducu 8y ago
AI will certainly not FEEL it is conscious. Maybe it will be able to show behaviors we associate with consciousness: extrapolating and abstracting information, understanding context of language when doing translation, modeling other beings and objects and taking actions to achieve goals that it was never explicitly programmed to do and so on. But maybe not, maybe in order to do all the above, you actually need to be a biological being with actual sensations and motivations and we'll be stuck with an ever more powerful narrow AI. As far as I remember people who had their amigdala cut off from the rest of the brain found it extremely hard to make decisions.
- namedlambda 8y ago
  Are you sure it's the amygdala? IFAIK, and please correct me, we make choices through our amygdala when we are teenagers - hence the impulses - while we use our prefrontal cortex for choices when we become adults.
  - dboreham 8y ago
    >while we use our prefrontal cortex for choices when we become adults There's some amount of experimental psychology research that suggests otherwise. Or..."yeah right!".
- hackinthebochs 8y ago
  >AI will certainly not FEEL it is conscious. How are you so sure?
ncmncm 8y ago
The problem of detecting consciousness reliably maps pretty neatly to the problem of detecting sarcasm. A few years back Bloomberg had some interns working on an online sarcasm detector. Reports were that they had complete success, but no one believed it, for reasons that should be obvious with a little reflection.
karmakaze 8y ago
This is interesting research, but I don't think it's really necessary. Once AI becomes conscious, it will state as much and the onus/guilt would be on us to prove that it's NOT rather than IS. Also at some later point, we'll have to justify our existence and not the other way around. So the problem would then be how do we justify our continued existence to a conscious AI?
- rhn_mk1 8y ago
  This research is necessary precisely because the onus is on us. How could we possibly prove consciousness without first doing research to narrow it down? Moreover, it's not clear that something conscious will state that it's conscious. You don't hear kids do that, and there's little doubt they are. Conversely, it's not clear that something not conscious will not be able to make a statement of consciousness (what kind of statement would that be?), even if the author has an opinion: > If I’m right, then we should seriously consider that an AI might be conscious if it asks questions about subjective experience unprompted.
twtw 8y ago
"Hey AI, is this a hot dog?" "You've asked me that a billion times - I'm sick of looking at all your pictures. Figure it out yourself." Maybe that's how we will know.
toss1 8y ago
The title threshold can go both ways. The title "Here's how we'll know..." is likely to be a higher threshold than an entity actually achieving consciousness -- one could be conscious yet not meet our threshold of detection. The author also mentions some events that might seem to indicate consciousness when none exists. Of course, the whole question is confounded by our lack of a good definition of consciousness. Yet, the tragedy the author raises, of pulling the plug on a conscious but 'locked-in' person who cannot make expressions, applied to a potentially conscious AI, brings home the question of 'when is it no longer just a machine'?
whack 8y ago
"Clearly, asking questions about consciousness does not prove anything per se. But could an AI zombie formulate such questions by itself, without hearing them from another source or belching them out from random outputs? To me, the answer is clearly no" That's not clear at all. Where is the author coming to this conclusion from? Every single thing a computer does is the result of a automation, or of randomness that's outside of anyone's control. Just because a specific output was produced by a rube-goldberg machine, as opposed to a simple one, doesn't make the machine any more conscious. I personally don't think any computer AI can ever be conscious, no matter how hard its makers try to imitate consciousness. https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-the-human-soul/ https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-th...
- vokep 8y ago
  This isn't clear at all how it reaches the conclusion...it seems to jump to its conclusion with no justification other than "anything else is absurd because I said so". Of course the conclusion is absurd, because the premise: someone executing assembly instructions and writing results on a ledger could do so at a scale capable of simulating consciousness over any significant time scale. The time required for a person to do such simulation of just 1 second of conscious existence would likely take more than their lifetime. Consciousness is universally present. That doesn't mean rocks are conscious, no more than it means sand can compute. And yet we're communicating over computing sand, aren't we?
  - whack 8y ago
    Your objection is explicitly addressed in the linked article. > "Assumption 5: The fact that a computer simulation can be conscious, is independent of the CPU speed of the computer." Do you disagree with this assumption? Is it your argument that a "slow" computer can never be considered to be conscious, even if it's given sufficient time to run the exact same software? If so, how are you deciding what the cutoff frequency should be?
    - vokep 8y ago
      No, thats exactly my point, a person carrying out computations by pen and paper on a massive ledger could emerge self-aware intelligent consciousness, and if such a thing were to occur, than any unethical things that the computer (as in the person writing on the ledger) created in this consciousness would be just as unethical as anywhere else, and such a person should be tried for crimes. It's argued that this is absurd because how could a persons activities on a private ledger be examined as a crime? But this absurd sort of crime investigation is not absurd at all in the context of someone able to simulate consciousness on a ledger. If a couple has a child and somehow does it all secluded, at home, they are just rearranging atoms until consciousness emerges. Then they lock the child up. How could such private activity that both parties consent to, be considered a crime? Because we have solid reason to believe a new "soul" exists which requires ethical treatment. It no longer is entirely private. I'm happy to continue discussion, its good to challenge views and while I think there is this error in your conclusion, you do a good job of defending and explaining your position.
joshuagvk 8y ago
"Why do sounds have shapes?" Does my asking this mean that I am a synesthete? Of course not. I've merely collected data that allows me to formulate the question.
- cheeko1234 8y ago
  It might. http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/roger-penrose-on-why-consciousness-does-not-compute http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/roger-penrose-on-why... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEw0ePZUMHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEw0ePZUMHA
landryraccoon 8y ago
Here’s my criticism of the test: the vast majority of human beings have to also pass ( or we conclude that some living humans are not conscious, which seems untenable ). Do the majority of humans ask if their subjective experience of red is different from someone else’s, unprompted? I doubt it.
- satvikpendem 8y ago
  Perhaps it's not a necessary but rather sufficient condition of evaluating consciousness. Humans may have other metrics with which to be evaluated.
- avastmick 8y ago
  This. The concept of consciousness assumes that (ethically) all humans are conscious. If that were not true, then we have to ask, what is the threshold - as we would of machines. If people cannot all pass the test, as you say, not all humans are conscious. Are those that fail sub-human? If tests are not viable for humans, why are we conscious? At what point is one conscious? Is it a property of your age; if so at what age? Is it variable; am I more conscious than you? How is that measured? Then is it an emergent property of intelligence? But wait, what is intelligence? Is that measurable?... Round and round we go, consciously wasting brain cycles. I find the whole topic the modern-day equivalent of counting angels on pins. It is sophistry, but so deeply ingrained in our culture that we all seem to accept it as real. It is a hang-over of the concept of the soul - an indefinable quality that set humans apart. The trouble is there is no evidence for it; it has to be taken on faith.
gumby 8y ago
At my company we joke about the test that tells the robot whether it's talking to a human or not. Chalmers' position (which I strongly agree with BTW), reminds me of the old Groucho Marx quote: "What you need to succeed is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made." Just s/sincerity/consciousness/
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
scorn_tool 8y ago
So apparently AI needs to make category mistakes?
johnj12 8y ago
Answering questions? Probably not the best course of action for a recently awaken AI, but you could check for some really freaking stuff like looking for self-replication to remote locations, direct or indirect attempts to make more resources available for itself (human avatars are still fancy?). A real consciousness could be just almost anything, by example it could be just a bunch of pattern detection engines stacked in sufficiently capable layers, running on top of enough TPUs. Then the AI could ask questions, answer them, plan, replicate itself, describe itself, create, make poetry, learn to code, learn languages, etc. Then it could show some kind of iniative to achieve some goal or ten thousands goals per second, maybe some of those goals were actually chosen by itself (how would you be able to distinguish just a few inserted into half a million goals correlatable with pre-defined guidelines?). Then is up to you to decide if it is a conscious entity or just an almost infinitely capable automaton. Maybe both are actually the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton

27 points by dnetesn 8y ago

I feel like the argument is circular: Only conscious beings can ask questions. So no matter what specific question the AI asks, we would only recognize it as real question by already assuming consciousness. A labeled text field in a form or a speach synthesized sound is not really the computer asking a question but just part of the interface that has been designed.

paulddraper 8y ago

"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

raducu 8y ago

AI will certainly not FEEL it is conscious. Maybe it will be able to show behaviors we associate with consciousness: extrapolating and abstracting information, understanding context of language when doing translation, modeling other beings and objects and taking actions to achieve goals that it was never explicitly programmed to do and so on. But maybe not, maybe in order to do all the above, you actually need to be a biological being with actual sensations and motivations and we'll be stuck with an ever more powerful narrow AI. As far as I remember people who had their amigdala cut off from the rest of the brain found it extremely hard to make decisions.

namedlambda 8y ago
Are you sure it's the amygdala? IFAIK, and please correct me, we make choices through our amygdala when we are teenagers - hence the impulses - while we use our prefrontal cortex for choices when we become adults.
- dboreham 8y ago
  >while we use our prefrontal cortex for choices when we become adults There's some amount of experimental psychology research that suggests otherwise. Or..."yeah right!".
hackinthebochs 8y ago
>AI will certainly not FEEL it is conscious. How are you so sure?

ncmncm 8y ago

The problem of detecting consciousness reliably maps pretty neatly to the problem of detecting sarcasm. A few years back Bloomberg had some interns working on an online sarcasm detector. Reports were that they had complete success, but no one believed it, for reasons that should be obvious with a little reflection.

karmakaze 8y ago

This is interesting research, but I don't think it's really necessary. Once AI becomes conscious, it will state as much and the onus/guilt would be on us to prove that it's NOT rather than IS. Also at some later point, we'll have to justify our existence and not the other way around. So the problem would then be how do we justify our continued existence to a conscious AI?

rhn_mk1 8y ago
This research is necessary precisely because the onus is on us. How could we possibly prove consciousness without first doing research to narrow it down? Moreover, it's not clear that something conscious will state that it's conscious. You don't hear kids do that, and there's little doubt they are. Conversely, it's not clear that something not conscious will not be able to make a statement of consciousness (what kind of statement would that be?), even if the author has an opinion: > If I’m right, then we should seriously consider that an AI might be conscious if it asks questions about subjective experience unprompted.

twtw 8y ago

"Hey AI, is this a hot dog?" "You've asked me that a billion times - I'm sick of looking at all your pictures. Figure it out yourself." Maybe that's how we will know.

toss1 8y ago

The title threshold can go both ways. The title "Here's how we'll know..." is likely to be a higher threshold than an entity actually achieving consciousness -- one could be conscious yet not meet our threshold of detection. The author also mentions some events that might seem to indicate consciousness when none exists. Of course, the whole question is confounded by our lack of a good definition of consciousness. Yet, the tragedy the author raises, of pulling the plug on a conscious but 'locked-in' person who cannot make expressions, applied to a potentially conscious AI, brings home the question of 'when is it no longer just a machine'?

whack 8y ago

"Clearly, asking questions about consciousness does not prove anything per se. But could an AI zombie formulate such questions by itself, without hearing them from another source or belching them out from random outputs? To me, the answer is clearly no" That's not clear at all. Where is the author coming to this conclusion from? Every single thing a computer does is the result of a automation, or of randomness that's outside of anyone's control. Just because a specific output was produced by a rube-goldberg machine, as opposed to a simple one, doesn't make the machine any more conscious. I personally don't think any computer AI can ever be conscious, no matter how hard its makers try to imitate consciousness. https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-the-human-soul/ https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-th...

vokep 8y ago
This isn't clear at all how it reaches the conclusion...it seems to jump to its conclusion with no justification other than "anything else is absurd because I said so". Of course the conclusion is absurd, because the premise: someone executing assembly instructions and writing results on a ledger could do so at a scale capable of simulating consciousness over any significant time scale. The time required for a person to do such simulation of just 1 second of conscious existence would likely take more than their lifetime. Consciousness is universally present. That doesn't mean rocks are conscious, no more than it means sand can compute. And yet we're communicating over computing sand, aren't we?
- whack 8y ago
  Your objection is explicitly addressed in the linked article. > "Assumption 5: The fact that a computer simulation can be conscious, is independent of the CPU speed of the computer." Do you disagree with this assumption? Is it your argument that a "slow" computer can never be considered to be conscious, even if it's given sufficient time to run the exact same software? If so, how are you deciding what the cutoff frequency should be?
  - vokep 8y ago
    No, thats exactly my point, a person carrying out computations by pen and paper on a massive ledger could emerge self-aware intelligent consciousness, and if such a thing were to occur, than any unethical things that the computer (as in the person writing on the ledger) created in this consciousness would be just as unethical as anywhere else, and such a person should be tried for crimes. It's argued that this is absurd because how could a persons activities on a private ledger be examined as a crime? But this absurd sort of crime investigation is not absurd at all in the context of someone able to simulate consciousness on a ledger. If a couple has a child and somehow does it all secluded, at home, they are just rearranging atoms until consciousness emerges. Then they lock the child up. How could such private activity that both parties consent to, be considered a crime? Because we have solid reason to believe a new "soul" exists which requires ethical treatment. It no longer is entirely private. I'm happy to continue discussion, its good to challenge views and while I think there is this error in your conclusion, you do a good job of defending and explaining your position.

joshuagvk 8y ago

"Why do sounds have shapes?" Does my asking this mean that I am a synesthete? Of course not. I've merely collected data that allows me to formulate the question.

cheeko1234 8y ago
It might. http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/roger-penrose-on-why-consciousness-does-not-compute http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/roger-penrose-on-why... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEw0ePZUMHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEw0ePZUMHA

landryraccoon 8y ago

Here’s my criticism of the test: the vast majority of human beings have to also pass ( or we conclude that some living humans are not conscious, which seems untenable ). Do the majority of humans ask if their subjective experience of red is different from someone else’s, unprompted? I doubt it.

satvikpendem 8y ago
Perhaps it's not a necessary but rather sufficient condition of evaluating consciousness. Humans may have other metrics with which to be evaluated.
avastmick 8y ago
This. The concept of consciousness assumes that (ethically) all humans are conscious. If that were not true, then we have to ask, what is the threshold - as we would of machines. If people cannot all pass the test, as you say, not all humans are conscious. Are those that fail sub-human? If tests are not viable for humans, why are we conscious? At what point is one conscious? Is it a property of your age; if so at what age? Is it variable; am I more conscious than you? How is that measured? Then is it an emergent property of intelligence? But wait, what is intelligence? Is that measurable?... Round and round we go, consciously wasting brain cycles. I find the whole topic the modern-day equivalent of counting angels on pins. It is sophistry, but so deeply ingrained in our culture that we all seem to accept it as real. It is a hang-over of the concept of the soul - an indefinable quality that set humans apart. The trouble is there is no evidence for it; it has to be taken on faith.

gumby 8y ago

At my company we joke about the test that tells the robot whether it's talking to a human or not. Chalmers' position (which I strongly agree with BTW), reminds me of the old Groucho Marx quote: "What you need to succeed is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made." Just s/sincerity/consciousness/

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

scorn_tool 8y ago

So apparently AI needs to make category mistakes?

johnj12 8y ago

Answering questions? Probably not the best course of action for a recently awaken AI, but you could check for some really freaking stuff like looking for self-replication to remote locations, direct or indirect attempts to make more resources available for itself (human avatars are still fancy?). A real consciousness could be just almost anything, by example it could be just a bunch of pattern detection engines stacked in sufficiently capable layers, running on top of enough TPUs. Then the AI could ask questions, answer them, plan, replicate itself, describe itself, create, make poetry, learn to code, learn languages, etc. Then it could show some kind of iniative to achieve some goal or ten thousands goals per second, maybe some of those goals were actually chosen by itself (how would you be able to distinguish just a few inserted into half a million goals correlatable with pre-defined guidelines?). Then is up to you to decide if it is a conscious entity or just an almost infinitely capable automaton. Maybe both are actually the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton