Mustafa Suleyman

It's a trick.

And that is just very important to remember as we try to make sense of these things and relate to them.

Because if you forget that, it can be very, very easy to get caught up in the narrative or the illusion, or as some have said, the psychosis of believing that these things are actually real when they're not.

Yeah.

Before I joined Microsoft 18 months ago, I started a company with my friend Reid Hoffman called Inflection AI.

We made an AI called PI, which stands for personal intelligence.

This is about three or four years ago now.

And it was the first AI to be really good at smooth, natural conversation, had a good emotional intelligence, and it was designed to be kind and supportive.

And we could see very early on that this use case of companionship, support, advice, life coach, some would call it therapy, but it's not really therapy.

It's just basic kindness and being listened to.

That is a huge, huge use case.

And I think it's a massively beneficial thing for the world.

So I'm in no way against those capabilities.

I just see that if they run away from us and we, you know, really kind of mishandle them, then they present other kinds of risks.

And that's what I'm trying to raise with the Seemingly Conscious AI blog.

Well, first we have to call it out and try to define what we think consciousness is.

So maybe let me just start there.

So consciousness is one of the slippery concepts in philosophy.

It's hard to apply empiricism and science to it because it's fundamentally subjective.

So even though you can reassure me that you're conscious and you can say all the right things and you can look into my eyes and you can give me that instinct that you're conscious, I fundamentally have to rely on a faith-based assessment to trust your experience of yourself.