Can an array of Nvidia chips really be conscious? And kill us all?

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The Other Hand 47 min 1 speaker 8 chapters transcribed 6 hours ago

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What is the central question about AI consciousness that frames the episode?

Chris Johns 0:11

The other hand is part of the ACAST Creator Network. Hello everyone. It's good to be back, and it's particularly good to be back to welcome uh somebody who's been on the podcast several times in the past, but sadly not very recently. That's my fault. Um but a welcome return for Professor Shane O'Mara of Trinity College Dublin. Shane is Professor of Experimental Brain Research, I think is his proper title, but that means new. Neuroscience, psychology, the whole brain thing. He's written lots of books. He's a very well known author, books about walking, books about talking. and lots of other things besides. He he has his own Substack, he has writes um in various ways, uh both academic and less formal ways.

Chris Johns 1:01

So a big welcome to you, Shane. It's great to have you back. I think it's a very appropriate moment in human history, dare I say, slightly pretentiously, to have you back, because we are in the middle of a maelstrom of debate about the human race facing an existential risk from artificial intelligence. We're all going to die, apparently, very soon, because of what these what we're originally called chatbots are going to do to us. But where I'd like to start, and then the conversation can go off wherever you would like to take it, is with a very specific neurosciencey question. Maybe it's a philosophical question as well. Maybe your discipline does have philosophical um mappings anyway. One of the things that we hear bandied around, we hear lots of language which

Chris Johns 1:50

Another discussion point that we'll have, I think, today is about language, is consciousness. These AI systems are said to be either approaching, one or two people think they might even be at, something called conscious. And if you just simply go into Claude or Chat GPT and ask for a definition of consciousness, I got earlier today twenty-two. I am told by all the various articles that I have read that there's no generally agreed definition of it and I know that you're going to tell us a little bit about progress being made into understanding consciousness, but I'll start with that that most fundamental, I guess, neuroscience question. Do you think that these AI systems are either approaching or will ever approach something that we understand to be consciousness?

Shane O'Mara 2:39

Thanks Chris and it's it's great to be back to to chat with you. Yeah, that's such a loaded question that uh That's why I asked it. It it really needs uh a little bit of teasing apart in terms of of what one might mean. You know, so for humans, consciousness is kind of primary. Descartes said it all those years ago. I think therefore I am. Uh you have to have a substration to think with to be conscious of your world. And of course if you ask an LLM, it some of them will tell you that uh they are conscious or they're not, but that depends on the programming that they've got. More recently I've noticed when you challenge them with this question, they say, no, I have no interior life. I'm offering a a probabilistic uh uh word token sequence based on the questions uh that you've asked me.

Shane O'Mara 3:29

And I suppose the question is, uh will an NVIDIA graphics card uh will we be able to use that to conjure up a form of consciousness by scaling lots of words together in some weird vector space? I think the answer is probably no. You know, people with primary progressive aphasia, if I might pick on a a neurological impairment, are very definitely conscious, but they're they lose their language capabilities slowly and become very impaired at their ability to think using words and to articulate using words. But they sleep, they wake, they have intentions, they uh eat, they they behave otherwise normally in in life. So the The kind of Idea that there's a close tie between language and consciousness is is reasonable, but

Shane O'Mara 4:19

Needing language for consciousness is not because of course chimpanzees don't speak. They did d they do communicate. Uh rats don't speak. They will engage in a kind of ultrasonic communication to signal fear and things like this. But um they they don't have language in the in the human sense.