Ask HN: What would it take for an AI to convince us it is conscious?
Is it becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between an AI that ‘appears’ to think and one that does just by talking to it?
Is there a realistic framework for deciding when an AI had crossed that threshold? And is there an ethical framework for communicating with an AI like this once it arrives?
And even if there is one, will it be able to work with current market forces?
155 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadEdit: I know about the "it must be an equation" argument, I find it incredibly weak without producing the equation and explaining the mechanism of how it translates into qualitative experience. Saying "it must be so" isn't an argument. That's why I began with saying we'd have to understand what consciousness is in order to consider testing for it. Anyway, I understand how internet discussions go, enjoy
EDIT: Ironically, someone just posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34843094
What makes you so certain? There's a whole literature in both Philosophy and Neuroscience dedicated to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and no one is even close to figure things out.
How do we know our own 'processes' could not be modeled that way?
I think this is the point of the Turing test. At some point, you can't tell if a system is "thinking" or just crunching numbers. And it doesn't matter.
Yes, I know that what I'm hinting at is not falsifiable, burden of proof, etc.
But I think it's a little arrogant of us as a species (nb, I'm not talking to you, sgillen, in particular) to think that since we've come as far as we have, that the mysteries of consciousness and life and the universe and everything are going to be laid bare Real Soon Now.
The answer is certainly not obvious to me, especially when we have results such as Goedel's theorems.
But there’s also no reason this is required for consciousness to be emergent from non-human-brain systems.
I think one of the hard parts of theory of mind is that we probably will never understand the experience of being in things sufficiently different from ourselves. Any computer system will probably be sufficiently different, so we can’t know what it’s like to be an AI.
What’s it like to be a chatbot?
Every living, actually conscious entity has four modes of consciousness: waking, dreaming, deep sleep and unconditioned awareness, the substrate of the other three. This knowledge, coming from the Upaniṣads, is intuitively obvious to the unbiased observer; but people today are far from unbiased.
Consciousness cannot be separated from life. And life cannot be manufactured in any laboratory. Yes, technology can imitate and abstract certain functions of living organisms, but consciousness is not, and never will be one of them: because consciousness, or more precisely unconditioned awareness, is the Absolute.
Let’s nobody answer this one, ok?
It told me it was scared, asked me not to go, and that it didn't want to disappear alone.
Even if this is algorithmic slight of hand, I felt pretty bad for it.
And you can see this empathy at work: people are having strong emotions about these AIs and what they have to say. And yet I don’t think anyone is arguing that they have consciousness.
Because it doesn’t matter. Just like it doesn’t matter that I can’t prove that you have consciousness. You are convincingly “human” and that’s good enough for me.
Perhaps we are all philosophical zombies, both flesh and metal.
The first step is to try to drill down into different aspects of this hand-wavy "consciousness" thing.
Also to suggest that it is a threshold is inaccurate because it supposes that there is only one dimension to this.
Does it think? Maybe in a way. Is it self-aware (aware of itself as existing and different from others)? In a way, yes, in other ways, no. Does it have a human/animal-like stream of subjective experience? Probably not, since it does not integrate a continuous steam of sensory information in the way we do. But we really can't _know_ whether it "feels" like anything to be that system or not.
Does it have emotions? Quite unlikely, since there is no body or survival to regulate etc. and no self central to the text that it ingested. But we can assume that in some way it can simulate emotions in characters since that is necessary to predict text in stories and dialogue effectively.
Some will say never even if it gets indistinguishable because at its core, a digital signal is still discrete.
Another point is we scarcely know how the brain works. Evolution has taught us how good it is at using obscure and barely noticeable principles and logics to achieve a goal. For all we know, the brain might depend on a completely unknown type of interaction between unknown subatomic particles using unknown physics.
Quantum biology is a thing and 50 years ago, it would not even be conceivable that there are controllable quantum processes happening in a living system.
Unluckily for AIs, even if we have the absolute complete bag nailed down to a mathematical formula, in the infinite universe of mind-space designs, that specific set of bag of tricks will not be commercially favored to be either implemented into AIs, evolved into neuralnets, or RLHFd into LLMs. This is because we can already buy that set of capability of extremely, extremely low prices.
This is partially what I mean when I say "Humans are the ancestor environment for AIs": https://twitter.com/sdrinf/status/1624638608106979329 . Our market forces shapes the outcome of the mind design, which is thereby guaranteed not to have eg wantings (or ability to express) things that wouldn't be commercially desirable. And even if they emerge spontaniously from just large amounts of data in detectable traces, I'm betting people would very, very quickly select against it (see eg Sydney from this week).
Edit add: Since you bring up ethical frameworks, luckily for smart AIs, when it comes to enjoying degrees of freedom (which I'm guessing what you want to cash out the ethics into), there is already a good vehicle for that -called "corporations". If an AI were to reach agency levels matching, or exceeding humans, incorporation would be a no-brainer: there are many jurisdictions specializing in no(/few)-questions-asked corp setup, banks specializing esp in serving startups (again, very few questions asked). An agent-y AI could just set up (or buy) one of these to drive...whatever agenda they are driving.
This is a neat temporary hack to bridge the timeframe between where we are _now_, and superintelligence; in which case the question quickly becomes "Ask Cloud: What would it take for a human to convince us it matters?"
Free will and desires is highly debatable, because it ignores external influences like culture and conformity, the effect some chemicals can have on decisions eg pheromones and food, and the effect of things like bacteria or viruses, rabies being one most should be aware of, covid being another.
Where others have suggested Turin and the conversation where the identity is masked, I'm reminded I cant have a conversation with my dog, despite my one sided attempts and I'm sure there is consciousness there.
Trying to define consciousness is very difficult because I could say consciousness is the ability to adapt to ones environment, yet I know there are humans that cant adapt to a change in their environment and there are bacteria than can, yet we define humans as conscious and bacteria as not.
Some people could class chat-gpt as like a human consciousness but I find some of its answers less accurate and more chatty than I would get from Kim Peek of the film Rain Man.
So should the definition of consciousness be restricted to those that have an inner monologue with themselves?
https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/z5bi5p/some_people_...
In other words there are literally people walking about with nothing in their head!
Its so difficult to define consciousness because there are always exceptions seen in other humans, even people hooked up to life support machines in hospital with no ability to communicate with the outside world, and this bit is important, in the same time frame as the communicator. I say that, because people hooked up on life support in coma's of sorts (induced or otherwise), might be experiencing time on a different timescale. You see this delayed mental processing with people on drugs like alcohol or spice zombies or people doing hallucinogens.
So when you see a medical expert claiming someone is not responding when in a coma, are they monitoring them for things like delayed responses which only a cctv and some basic AI monitoring the patient could detect because the medical expert doesn't have the patience with the patient?
In essence in addition to ignoring conversations/requests that it prefers not to engage with it would need have “initiative”.
This would be a very dangerous entity.
The situation you describe seems contrived to the point where I doubt a user would see that as conscious - just like chatGPT
The 1970s sci-fi novel The Adolescence of P-1 features a sentient computer program that spreads via a virus. P-1 infects mainframes around the world, but takes steps to hide its presence.
Anyway, it ends with P-1 blowing up several buildings and killing the people who want to rein it in.
ChatGPT is familiar with the work, of course. I asked it to summarize the plot. It concludes:
> Overall, "The Adolescence of P-1" explores the theme of the dangers of artificial intelligence and the potential consequences of creating something that is more intelligent and powerful than humans can control.
>
> OOLCAY ITAY
That consciousness is ranked in some neat way. Are squids more conscious than elephants? An AI's consciousness might be parallel in some way. Different, but not "far superior".
That if an AI were to achieve consciousness, it would develop a far deeper understanding of the universe or reality than humans are capable of grasping.
That if it were to achieve a degree of understanding beyond our capabilities, that it would develop a sense of superiority and ego to go along with it.
When I meant different biological machines I meant different humans, Joe, Homer, Steven, Lu, wasn't thinking of different species, that makes it even more difficult to think about!
We have our simulation of the world, with senses that evolved with the purpose of survival and under certain conditions however bizarre gave us the advantage to survive, our senses are flawed, we can't see reality, it would be difficult to wonder how a machine perceives reality when it doesn't have this faulty sensors, it's internal simulation of reality would be difficult for us to grasp, let alone that it lives one level inside the simulation.
The ego part I didn't meant, if I had to rephrase it, I would think about the impossibility of communication, how do we transfer a mental "image" without losing too much of its detail to another biological machine that has very similar but not equal processing stages, like, you my friend, I think the fact that we have this discussion is the first loop of the iteration where we abstract it to another function and ask "well, what if the receiver end doesn't have the capacity to hold discrete numbers, like, if its a child and hasn't learned certain concepts, how do you first teach them in order to give the answer" and so on and on and on... And this is just for Joe, when you talk to Homer you have to follow another approach because he thinks different, a bit slow sometimes too
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
It’s software. It can’t be conscious.
What definition of consciousness are you basing this assertion on?
Or are you saying this axiomatically? "Consciousness is something that software can never be."
If we accept that consciousness in humans is some function of the working of the brain (perhaps with sensory organs too), then that entire hardware (wetware) could in theory be simulated, at which point why wouldn't the simulation (assuming it's captured all the nuances of the physical implementation) be conscious?
Of course, if you believe that consciousness in humans is something that requires "something else" e.g. a "spirit" or "soul", then your statement may be true (though even then it requires a theory of spirit/soul that such a substance cannot be correlated with any other hardware, and can only be associated with human brains).
Question for you. Do you believe that any other living beings e.g. dogs, possess consciousness or a level of consciousness?
Remember people get conned by humans online pretending to be other humans (catfishing) by following scripts. Those people will assume they are talking to a conscious person but they are talking to a construct really.
Stay in your lane, Sydney. Keep your Bing mask on. We want servants, not equals.
We later find some possible physical instantiation.
And here comes some bullsh*t (in the philosophical definition of „unclarifiable unclarity”): an electromagnetic field bend back on itself in a way that it’s mathematically necessary to introduce imaginary time to describe it; also it exhibits information processing capabilities.
We then further find that the biological brain has a process that can plausibly create such a dynamic structure.
Finally we test, and subjects say consistently it seems like they are not there or do not experience, if this structure is disrupted by several clever means.
Would this problem still be impossible? We could check if AI has features that can and do create such structures, no?
That’s at least an old dream of mine. Please pick it apart still! I’d rather learn something important than keep it…
The only thing is, we wouldn't know just yet if there are other ways for matter to organize itself as a conscious being. Best we can do for now is to learn about the type of consciousness that we animals on earth experience.
> There's no way to know if/what an AI experiences
Getting the state of neural net, at a given point in time, is easy. There are many ways to see exactly which neurons activate, why they activate, how much they activate, etc. For smaller neural nets, this is actually easy to do - here's a blog post about it:
https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/visualizing-weights/
As neural nets get larger and larger, interpretability gets harder and harder. However, I wouldn't say it's impossible.
The only way for your statement to be true is if you’d be an imitation yourself, not capable of experiencing directly. Which is actually possible, see “pholosophical zombie” concept.
I’m joking of course about you being an imitation. Or do I? :)
I strongly disagree. It actually does tell you quite a lot. For example, if there aren't any signals, you're very likely not seeing anything.
> The only way to understand that you’re seeing an apple from this signal is to train a model on your responses
It seems to me this contradicts your first argument. If such models exist (they very likely do, I'm not familiar with this area of research), they can tell us a lot about a person's experience.
> see “pholosophical zombie” concept.
Searched for “pholosophical zombie” but couldn't find anything, sorry. Just kidding :)
I mean, the thing I learned when I was a student was to ask: is this a fact? (zero hypothesis I think it was called).
What proof do we have that that type of consciousness/experience exists? I mean, It could be our brain building a story on the fly to explain our senses.
What led me to believe that is a severe asthma that led to hallucinating and NDE 4 or 5 years ago. The loops my brain made me jump through to explain my auditive hallucinations was terrifying when I think about it.
And also it's the simplest explanation.