Epigraph:

And they ask you concerning the soul. Say, ‘The soul is by the command of my Lord; and of the knowledge thereof you have been given but a little.’ (Al Quran 17:85)

كَيْفَ تَكْفُرُونَ بِاللَّهِ وَكُنتُمْ أَمْوَاتًا فَأَحْيَاكُمْ ۖ ثُمَّ يُمِيتُكُمْ ثُمَّ يُحْيِيكُمْ ثُمَّ إِلَيْهِ تُرْجَعُونَ

How can you ignore God when you were lifeless and He gave you life, when He will cause you to die, then resurrect you to be returned to Him. (Al Quran 2:28)

O humanity! A lesson is set forth, so listen to it ˹carefully˺: those ˹idols˺ you invoke besides Allah can never create ˹so much as˺ a fly, even if they ˹all˺ were to come together for that. And if a fly were to snatch anything away from them, they cannot ˹even˺ retrieve it from the fly. How powerless are those who invoke and those invoked! (Al Quran 22:73)

Zia H Shah MD’s comment: Based on my understanding of the literal word of the All-Knowing God, the Glorious Quran, I have a high level of certainty that AI will never be conscious. The same conclusion can also be drawn from good philosophy.

Source: MSN

Story by Frank Landymore

Are AI models conscious, and if not, could they be in the near future? The possibility is far-fetched, but AI companies seem to feel it’s in their best interests to keep the question as open-ended as possible.

Now, the Financial Times reports that three of the industry’s top dogs — Anthropic, Google’s AI lab DeepMind, and Meta — have all hired experts in fields like psychology, philosophy, and ethics to pursue research into machine consciousness and AI welfare. 

Anthropic, which has arguably done the most out of the bunch to anthropomorphize its models and play up the AI consciousness angle — its chatbot has the human name of “Claude,” after all — has been testing its models for behaviors that resemble “panic” and “anxiety,” per the reporting, and is pursuing “model welfare research” to explore whether AI models might have experiences that matter morally.

“We remain deeply uncertain about this, but we think the question is serious enough to study carefully as AI systems get more capable,” the company said in a statement.

DeepMind, meanwhile, has hired University of Cambridge researcher Henry Shevlin as a philosopher working on machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and AGI readiness, per the reporting. (Earlier this year, Shevlin sparked a wave of discourse in online AI circles after sharing his stunned reaction to an email he received from an AI agent.)

DeepMind ethicist Iason Gabriel, who leads the lab’s AGI and society team, called the question of AI consciousness “very complicated,” and described AI as “highly capable cognitive agents that are also just very deeply different from human beings and even from animal consciousness.”

These weighty claims are disputed by many scientists and AI researchers. But the FT, in seeking a counterargument to round out its reporting, quotes an expert who makes claims that ascribe a questionable degree of humanlike agency to chatbots. “[AI models] have goals, they can deceive, they can hide what their true interests are,” Susan Schneider, director of the Center for the Future of AI, Mind and Society, told the newspaper. But she added it’s “entirely scientifically possible that they’re doing this without having the felt quality of experience, which is what consciousness is.”

Certainly, the possibility of AI consciousness shouldn’t be completely dismissed out of hand. But neither should alien civilizations, which are generally treated more as a sci-fi musing than an urgent existential issue. 

Moreover, we should be skeptical when most of the noise on this topic is coming from the industry itself. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly dangled the possibility of AI consciousness in interviews. And his company’s research frequently makes bold claims about their models showing humanlike behavior, such as supposedly harboring “emotions.” Just remember that it’s easier for AI companies to string us along with wild Skynet doomsday scenarios instead of confronting the tech’s far mundane consequences currently playing out before our eyes.

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