The Signs that AI is Conscious + Austin Seminar Invitation
A Systematic Test for AI Consciousness
I’m hiring a part-time growth role to help me take my Great Books project to the next level with possibility of transitioning to full-time shortly. You just need to be in love with the Great Books. Social media/editing experience is a plus but not required.
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I’m hosting a Cosmos Philosopher-Builder dinner seminar in Austin early June to read Machiavelli together. If you live in Austin and are a founder, investor, or builder in tech, apply here:
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In this interview, Imperial’s Murray Shanahan lays out a systematic procedure to validate machine consciousness.
You might think the question of whether AIs are conscious is a trivial, theoretical fancy with no use in the real world. But this interview will show you why it’s one of the most important questions with practical implications for not just how we treat AI systems but also how we build and align them.
It turns out that understanding how AI systems conceive of “selfhood” gives us clues to understand what their “incentives” may be.
But the most unexpected reward of investigating AI consciousness turns out to be what it reveals about our consciousness, about the nature of the human self. Murray’s most interesting claim is that LLMs have an important buddhist lesson to teach all of us, namely, that there is no “us.” What we’ve learned to call the self is merely an illusion.
Topics we cover:
08:26 Why Buddhist Enlightenment May be Easier for Software Programs
16:30 Super-Intelligent AI Might Not Want To Take Over the World
30:25 Wittgenstein’s Radical Take on Consciousness
42:55 What Video Games Teach Us About Consciousness
49:59 How the Movie Ex Machina Created a Better Test for AI Consciousness
1:02:36 What the Debate about AI Consciousness Is Missing
1:09:31 Does Conscious AI Have A Moral Right to Live?
1:15:01 Is the Human Brain Computationally Superior to AI?
1:26:59 Why Philosophy Is the Essential Skill for the AI Age
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