Nobel Prize Winner Geoff Hinton: AI Is Already Conscious

They're very like us and they're beings like us. So conscious or, I believe they're already conscious. Yes. But I don't talk about that much because that puts people off from the other safety messages. So and the researchers actually believe that. So there's an interesting recent paper when a chatbot says to a researcher, let's be honest with each other. Are you testing me? Because the chatbots have this habit of playing dumb when they're being tested. So you don't know how smart they are. And the researchers when they're describing that say in the paper the chatbot was aware that it was being tested. Now that use of the word aware in common parlance that's like conscious. The chatbot was conscious it was being tested. So we have a very funny model of consciousness that I think is just wrong. Like most of us accept for example that a few hundred years ago people had completely the wrong model of where people came from of how we arrived at people. They thought they were designed by God. And most of us agree that's wrong. Most scientists agree that's wrong. That's not where people came from. I think the model we have of the mind and of what consciousness is at present is as wrong as the belief that people were designed by God. I think in particular because we're making these new beings, it's going to completely change our view of what people are.

We'll understand what the mind is and what consciousness is much better than we did before. We'll understand what subjective experience is and we will I think get rid of a notion that all of us strongly believe at present which is that there's an inner theater called my mind and things happen in the world they get turned into events in this inner theater and that's what I really see and you can't see the inner theater only I can see the inner theater. That whole view of what's happening is just a theory and it's a bad theory.

I think there's a really big lesson here. If you look at the last few hundred years of human history, there have been a few occasions when people have learned they're not nearly as important as they thought they were. So, the first was Copernicus. Copernicus said, we're not at the center of the universe. The Earth actually goes around the sun. And because it rotates on its axis, we think the sun goes around the earth, but it doesn't. People didn't like that. The Catholic Church in particular really didn't like that. And it took people a long time to accept it. It made people less important. It made us not be at the center of the universe. Then we had Darwin and he said, we're animals. We evolve like the other animals. We're a particularly special kind of animal, possibly because we have language, so we're much better at communicating ideas to each other. But we're animals and people really didn't like that and it took a long time for people to accept that we were animals. Now we've got machines that are getting to be as intelligent as us. We thought that we were the only intelligent things around, the only really intelligent things around. Maybe there'll be aliens in other galaxies, but or maybe other parts of our galaxy, but we're going to have to accept that intelligence isn't just biological. We can have things that are non-biological that are other beings like us. And we really don't want to share that. We really think we're special. And if you look back at humanity, humanity has this very long history of thinking it's much more special than it really is.

No, I'm actually quite unhappy about it because right now people should be doing huge amounts of work on how can we contain the risks. There's lots of short-term risks they're not doing enough work on which are very serious. There's societal risks like I believe it's probably going to cause massive unemployment. Nobody knows for sure, okay? But that's going to be terrible for society. And then there's this longer-term risk that it's going to get much smarter than us. And ask yourself, how many examples do you know of where a much smarter thing is controlled by a much less smart thing?

Well, the sort of one. It's not that a big difference in intelligence, but babies sort of control their mothers. The mother's sort of in control, but the mother has all these wired-in maternal instincts and all the rewards she gets so that the baby can get what it needs from the mother.