AI consciousness is inevitable: A theoretical computer science perspective

Very unsatisfactory discussion. Just a weird soup of all the current theoretical philosophical and neuroscientific models… with no ‘inevitable’ about any of it.<p>If I’m missing something important here, let me know.

If this is true, what then? The idea was that AI&#x2F;Robots would work for us. It would be unethical if we force conscious beings to work for us. It&#x27;s like slavery all over again.

For those not familiar, this was published by Lenore Blum and Manuel Blum (husband and wife). Manuel&#x27;s speedup theorem from 1967 is totally mind-blowing. Unfortunately I&#x27;m not as familiar with Lenore&#x27;s work.<p>&gt; Blum&#x27;s speedup theorem shows that for any complexity measure, there exists a computable function such that there is no optimal program computing it, because every program has a program of lower complexity.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Blum%27s_speedup_theorem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Blum%27s_speedup_theorem</a>

Consciousness is an evolved mechanism like sight, the ability to feel pain, and so on. Given that, I find arguments like this unlikely. If you want to build a conscious machine, you&#x27;re going to have to reverse engineer consciousness in animals.<p>Advances in AI have raised the question of whether consciousness is overrated. It&#x27;s looking more and more like general intelligence doesn&#x27;t require consciousess. And there&#x27;s no reason to assume that consciousness will &quot;emerge&quot; in generally intelligent systems.

They try to define &quot;conscious content&quot;, &quot;conscious attention&quot; and &quot;conscious awareness&quot; in their system (pages 6-8) -- but nothing really convincingly says why a system with this architecture should have an inner experience, i.e. I don&#x27;t see an answer to the hard problem. I think this is a feature of a lot of models of consciousness that have some &quot;theater&quot; concept -- they just narrow where consciousness happens without providing a complete explanation.<p>I&#x27;m not convinced.

So they start with the &quot;theater model&quot; of consciousness. I mean, at least they have a model; that&#x27;s not nothing. But they don&#x27;t have a <i>definition</i> of consciousness (as far as I saw), and they give no reason why we should buy the theater model of consciousness.<p>So something that we can&#x27;t define, but we have at least one model that may or may not be kind of like it, they argue that it&#x27;s inevitable. Well, personally I don&#x27;t find that to be very persuasive.

I don&#x27;t buy this argument. Given that we don&#x27;t understand how and why we are conscious, it is a big leap based on pure speculation to assert that AI consciousness is inevitable. Our survival of the next century isn&#x27;t inevitable, and I don&#x27;t see us reaching AGI before then anyway. (LLMs are not a path to AGI no matter what those with vested interest in LLMs say.)

I always thought excel was stubborn, now I know why.

Every time I see this claim I roll my eyes.