Computer scientists don’t truly understand this
Seeing | Computer Science | 2024-07-14
![Silicon,Wafer,With,Microchips,Used,In,Electronics,For,The,Fabrication Silicon Wafer with microchips used in electronics for the fabrication of integrated circuits.](https://www.essentiafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/shutterstock_1984210538-copy-2000x1000.jpg)
In this lecture given at the G10 conference, the director of the Essentia Foundation, Bernardo Kastrup, argues why the idea of conscious AI, though we cannot refute it categorically, is silly. Perhaps we should rather ask ourselves the question why we entertain the idea of sentient computers in the first place. According to Kastrup, this has a lot to do with the fact that most computer scientists are power users of computers but they’ve never built a computer themselves. If they had, they would be familiar with the nuts and bolts, and they would understand that the idea of microscopic transistors becoming conscious is not that different than proposing that a sufficiently complex sewage system—consisting of water pipes and valves—would become conscious.
Exactly because AI is having a fundamental impact on society with many regulatory and perhaps even existential challenges, it is very important that especially in academia we strongly distinguish between fact and fiction: to think that AI’s running on Turing machines—i.e. all AI’s we currently have—can become conscious is not even science fiction, it’s pure fantasy.
![Subhash MIND BEFORE MATTER scaled Subhash MIND BEFORE MATTER scaled](https://www.essentiafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Subhash-MIND-BEFORE-MATTER-scaled-1000x500.jpg)
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