Anil Seth

But could it ever be conscious?

Will a robot ever gaze at a sunset and experience the beautiful colors, the reds and the oranges?

Will it feel a sense of beauty or a rush of joy?

So for centuries, people have fantasized about playing God by creating artificial versions of ourselves.

From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Hal in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and Ava in Alex Garland's Ex Machina, this is a dream reinvented with every breaking wave of technology.

And with AI, the wave is a big one.

The AI we have is already smart, at least in some ways.

but could it ever be conscious?

Will a robot ever gaze at a sunset and experience the beautiful colors, the reds and the oranges?

Will it feel a sense of beauty or a rush of joy?

Or will computers, however smart they get, always remain dark on the inside, always an object and never a subject?

Whether AI can be conscious is one of the most consequential questions we face in our time.

If computers can be conscious or sentient or aware, we'd be entering a new era in human history.

We'd have new entities that have their own inner lives, new inventions that matter for their own sakes and not only for their effects on us.

Conscious AI might suffer the click of a mouse, perhaps in ways we wouldn't even recognize.

And if silicon can be sentient, then maybe our messy flesh-and-blood bodies will soon be superseded by machines that never age and cannot die.

Now, over the last few years, progress in AI has been simply astonishing, and who knows what's around the corner.

Many experts think that conscious AI is possible.

Quite a few think it's inevitable, and some, some think it's here already.

I think they're wrong.