Is AI already conscious? Posted on : May 02 - 2020

The ultimate goal of most high-level AI research is the development of a general artificial intelligence (GAI). In essence, what we want is a synthetic mind that could function the same as a human were it placed into a physical vessel of similar capability.

Most experts – not all – believe we’re decades away from anything of the sort. Unlike other incredibly complex problems such as nuclear fusion or readjusting the Hubble Constant, nobody really understands yet what GAI actually looks like.

Some researchers think Deep Learning is the path to machines that think like humans, others believe we’ll need an entirely new calculus to create the necessary “master algorithm,” and still others think GAI is probably impossible.

But the fact of the matter is that scientists don’t truly understand intelligence as it relates to the human brain, or consciousness as it relates to anything. We’re just scratching the gray-matter surface when it comes to understanding how intelligence and consciousness emerge in the human brain.

As far as AI goes, in lieu of a GAI all we have is patchwork neural networks and clever algorithms. It’s hard to make an argument that modern AI will ever have human intelligence and even harder to demonstrate a path towards actual robot consciousness. But it’s not impossible.

In fact, AI might already be conscious.

Mathematician Johannes Kleiner and physicist Sean Tull recently pre-published a research paper on the nature of consciousness that seems to indicate, mathematically speaking, that the universe and everything in it is imbued with physical consciousness.

Basically the duo’s paper sorts out some of the math behind a popular theory called the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness (ITT). It says that everything in the entire universe exhibits the traits of consciousness to some degree or another.

This is an interesting theory because it’s supported by the idea that consciousness emerges as a result of physical states. You’re conscious because of your ability to “experience” things. A tree, for example, is conscious because it can “sense” the sun’s light and bend towards it. An ant is conscious because it experiences ant stuff, and on and on it goes.

It’s a bit hard to make the leap from living creatures such as ants to inanimate objects such as rocks and spoons though. But, if you think about it, those things could be conscious because, as Neo learned in The Matrix, there is no spoon. Instead, there’s just a bunch of molecules bunched together in spoon formation. If you look closer and closer, eventually you’ll get down to the subatomic particles shared by everything that physically exists in the universe. Trees and ants and rocks and spoons are literally made of the exact same stuff. View More