I am so used to ideologically extreme and transgressive articles published in science and other professional journals, that when one publishes commonsense commentary, I think it should be applauded.
As most readers know, there is a great advocacy push underway to have AI declared to be — or soon to be — conscious and hence, entitled to “rights” as “persons.” (I have responded to this advocacy on several occasions.) Now, an article in Nature — written by three academics — strongly rebuts that blatant anthropomorphism. From “Three Reasons Why AI Is Not Conscious and Perhaps Never Will Be:
Between us, we’ve spent decades studying consciousness from diverse scientific perspectives: experimental neuroscience, theoretical neurobiology and philosophy of mind. On the basis of this work, we feel that consciousness in AI is extraordinarily unlikely, at least in the digital, silicon-based systems that underpin today’s technologies.
Pet peeve: They really mean they “think” that AI consciousness is unlikely, not that they “feel” it. Those concepts are not the same and that matters. I think — ha — that we should stop conflating the two.
Back to the article. The professors list three reasons for their assertion. First, they distinguish between “intelligence” and “consciousness”:
Intelligence is not consciousness: What we mean by consciousness is simple enough: it is what goes away with dreamless sleep or under general anaesthesia, and what returns after waking up or while dreaming. Conscious experiences feel like something, whether it is tasting ice cream on a hot day or seeing the vibrant colours of a sunset…
This definition of consciousness introduces the first reason for scepticism about conscious AI. Consciousness is not the same thing as intelligence. Consciousness is about being and feeling; intelligence — very broadly — is all about doing, or performing functions. Just because something is intelligent does not mean that it is conscious…
Second. The human brains is not merely “an information-processing device”:
Silicon brains: The idea of conscious AI is motivated by the assumption that algorithms running on silicon are, in principle, sufficient for consciousness. In other words, that computation of the right kind is all that it takes, and that it doesn’t matter whether these computations are implemented inside carbon-based brains or in silicon-based computers. Philosophers call this assumption computational functionalism. Although computations are clearly sufficient to produce forms of intelligence — as modern AI systems demonstrate — it is much less clear that they could also be sufficient for consciousness.
Computational functionalism is widely assumed among members of the tech community and is popular among some scientists and philosophers, too, but we think it is fatally flawed because brains are not — or at least not just — computers that are made of meat.
The third considers two theories of consciousness that require living tissue as a predicate for consciousness:
These proposals are all forms of biological naturalism: the view that biological properties are necessary for consciousness. Pulling all this together, the balance of theory and evidence strongly suggests that, no matter how intelligent it is, silicon-based AI is unlikely to be or become conscious.
The authors conclude:
The default position of the research community should therefore be that AI is not conscious and should not be treated as such.
In our view, silicon, digital AI systems should be considered objects, not subjects; they are smart tools, not smart people. Advocating that current AI systems should have rights and welfare protection is not just mistaken, it diverts attention and scarce resources away from where they belong: dedicated to the well-being of fellow sentient beings.
Bravo. I think much more could and should be said about this. But good on the editors of Nature for pushing back against the subversive notion that a machine can be the moral equivalent of a human being.