Geoffrey Hinton

If you replace workers with AIs, the government loses its tax base.

It has to somehow be able to tax the AIs, but the big companies aren't going to like that.

So the problem here is not really a scientific problem.

It's that...

Most people in our culture have a theory of how the mind works, and they have a view of consciousness as some kind of essence that emerges.

I think consciousness is like phlogiston, maybe.

It's an essence that's designed to explain things.

And once we understand those things, we won't be trying to use that essence to explain them.

I want to try and convince you that a multimodal chatbot already has subjective experience.

So people use the word sentience or consciousness or subjective experience.

Let's focus on subjective experience for now.

Most people in our culture think that the way the mind works is it's kind of internal theater.

And when you're doing perception, the world shows up in this internal theater and only you can see what's there.

So if I drink a lot and I say to you, I have the subjective experience of little pink elephants floating in front of me, most people interpret that as, there's this inner theater, my mind, and I can see what's in it, and what's in it is little pink elephants.

And they're not made of real pink and real elephants, so they must be made of something else.

So philosophers invent qualia, which is kind of the phlogiston of cognitive science.

They say they must be made of qualia.

Let me give you a completely different view that is Daniel Dennett's view, who was a great philosopher of cognitive science.

The late great.

That view of the mind is just utterly wrong.