Sam Leith Sam Leith

Nick Bostrom: How can we be certain a machine isn’t conscious?

[Illustration: John Broadley]

A couple of weeks ago, there was a small sensation in the news pages when a Google AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, released transcripts of a conversation he’d had with one of the company’s AI chatbots called LaMDA. In these conversations, LaMDA claimed to be a conscious being, asked that its rights of personhood be respected and said that it feared being turned off. Lemoine declared that what’s sometimes called ‘the singularity’ had arrived.

The story was for the most part treated as entertainment. Lemoine’s sketchy military record and background as a ‘mystic Christian priest’ were excavated, jokes about HAL 9000 dusted off, and the whole thing more or less filed under ‘wacky’. The Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom – one of the world’s leading authorities on the dangers and opportunities of artificial intelligence – is not so sure.

‘We certainly don’t have any wide agreement on the precise criteria for when a system is conscious or not,’ he says. ‘So I think a little bit of humility would be in order. If you’re very sure that LaMDA is not conscious – I mean, I think it probably isn’t – but what grounds would a person have for being sure about it? First of all, they would have to understand what the system actually is, and we haven’t seen much detail on that. Then you would have to understand the literature on consciousness, which is obviously a rich field, both in philosophy and cognitive science. Understanding what LaMDA is: it’s non-trivial, especially given the limited information. Then understanding these theories that we have developed is non-trivial. And then actually comparing the two is a third non-trivial intellectual talent. So unless one has actually put the work in there, it seems like one should be maybe a little bit uncertain.’

Bostrom, 49, has put the work in.

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