More than forty years have passed since Ridley Scott taught us in “Blade Runner” (1982) as an auto scheduled system, personified in the replicant Roy Batty, could face his reality from the consciousness of his existence. Today, fiction is increasingly real and not because of the special effects or the great inventions of CGI, but precisely Because the stories that previously constituted a yearning for our world today seem to be reflected in it. Undoubtedly, these four decades have led to the public debate with respect to this matter expanding its magnitude with knowledge of cause.
It seems that the emergence of artificial intelligence has come to stay and, as happened with the arrival of mobile phones, the only thing we can do about it is to learn to live with it. However What do scientists think about the limits of this new technology? The question that everyone is asked in relation to it focuses decisively on its humanization and, consequently, on the probable replacement of the human hand with robotics. In the workplace some replacement cases have already been contemplated but most of these respond to physical activities.
Emotions, feelings and consciousness are three terms a priori opposite to a system of this nature, but, there is the small possibility that in the future, who knows if tomorrow will be present, its compatibility becomes carried out. In this way, one of the latest BBC articles He has collected the opinion of several experts to clarify their concerns and the likelihood of this “ghost threat”. The Center for Science of Consciousness of the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom developed a project in order to study every corner of human consciousness.
Is a robotic consciousness possible?
Dreamachine is the name that the research device receives. The first purpose of it is Through the nature of consciousness, understand the functioning of silicon brains of artifice intelligencel. Today, tools like Chat GPT are capable, at times, of “feeling” or at least of appearing thought. And that is why many support this belief in the intelligent system feedback and in its conscious acense. In contrast, other professionals such as Anil Seth, from the University of Sussex, oppose this idea.
“We associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go hand in hand in humans. But the fact that they go together in us does not mean that they go together in general, for example in animals“, He also reports, ensures that there is another trend in the scientific field to delimit the future of artificial intelligence, as if there was no other possibility than the domain of human faculties.” We did not have these conversations enough with the rise of social networks, to our detriment. But with AI, it is not too late. We can decide what we want, “says the teacher.
The possibility that AI is conscious
There are few cases in which reflection on conscious artificial intelligence has played a bad past to professionals, such as the suspension of Blake Lemoine in 2022 of Google for these statements. Therefore, mere conversation also involves a risk in these convulsive times. On the other hand, Kyle Fish, Welfare Director of the AI of Anthropic signed in November 2024 a report that suggested that the AI conscience It is a realistic possibility in the near future.
He even added in the middle The New York Times, an existing 15% possibility about the awareness of Chatbots currently. That is, it is possible that the systems we use in day to day have a certain consciousness. But the sustenance of this statement is even more surprising since it is given by the complete inaccessibility of the systems that are generated today. Therefore, nobody knows exactly how they work.
“Actually, we do not understand very well the way the LLM work internally, and that is a reason for concern“, says the main scientist of Google Deepmind, Murray Shanahan, and Professor Emerito de ia at the Imperial College in London.