Blake Lemoine the incident is remembered today as the peak of artificial intelligence’s popularity. This brought the whole idea of conscious AI into the public consciousness for a news cycle or two, but also sparked a discussion among both computer scientists and consciousness researchers that has only intensified over the years. While the tech community continues to publicly downplay the whole idea (and impoverished Lemoine), privately it has begun to take the possibility much more seriously. Sentient AI may lack a clear commercial justification (how can we make money from it?) and raise arduous moral dilemmas (how should we treat a machine capable of suffering?). However, some artificial intelligence engineers have concluded that the holy grail of artificial general intelligence – a machine that is not only superintelligent but also endowed with human levels of understanding, creativity and common sense – may require something like consciousness to achieve. In the tech community, what had been an informal taboo around conscious AI – as a prospect the public would find terrifying – suddenly began to crumble.
The turning point came in the summer of 2023, when a group of 19 leading computer scientists and philosophers published an 88-page report titled “Consciousness in artificial intelligence“, informally known as the Butlin Report. Within days, it seemed to be read by everyone in the artificial intelligence and consciousness sciences community. The draft report’s executive summary included the following surprising sentence: “Our analysis suggests that none of the current artificial intelligence systems are sentient, but it also suggests that there are no obvious barriers to building conscious artificial intelligence systems.”
The authors admitted that part of the inspiration for convening the group and writing the report was “the case of Blake Lemoine.” “If Artificial Intelligence Can Appear Conscious” a co-author told Science magazine“This makes it an urgent priority for scientists and philosophers to consider this issue.”
However, what caught everyone’s attention was one statement in the preprint abstract: “there are no obvious barriers to building conscious artificial intelligence systems.” When I read these words for the first time, I felt that an important threshold had been crossed, and not only a technological one. No, it had to do with our identity as a species.
What would it mean for humanity to discover one day in the near future that a fully conscious machine had been born? My guess is that this would be a Copernican moment that would violently overthrow our sense of centrality and uniqueness. We humans have spent several thousand years defining ourselves in opposition to “lesser” animals. This involved denying animals such supposedly uniquely human characteristics as feelings (one of Descartes’ most glaring errors), language, reason, and consciousness. Over the past few years, most of these distinctions have broken down as scientists have shown that many species are intelligent and conscious, have feelings, and use language and tools, questioning humanity’s centuries-old uniqueness. This shift, which is still ongoing, has raised thorny questions about our identity as well as our moral obligations to other species.
In the case of artificial intelligence, the threat to our lofty self-image comes from a completely different direction. Now we humans will have to define ourselves in terms of artificial intelligence, not other animals. Since computer algorithms outperform us in sheer brainpower – easily beating us at games like chess and Go and various forms of “higher” thinking like mathematics – we can at least take comfort in the fact that we (and many other animal species) still have the blessings and burdens of consciousness and the ability to feel and have subjective experiences. In this sense, artificial intelligence can serve as a common adversary, bringing humans and other animals closer together: us against it, the living against machines. This modern solidarity would be an uplifting story and could be good news for the animals invited to Team Conscious. But what happens if artificial intelligence begins to challenge the human – I should say animal – monopoly on consciousness? Who will we be then?