Geoffrey Hinton Just Said AI Is Already Conscious

Oh, I think that's complete nonsense. So, anybody who uses a chatbot regularly knows they understand. So, here's what these people are claiming. They're claiming that you have a system, you can ask it any question, and without understanding the question, it can give you the correct answer. That's absurd. You can't answer a question unless you understand the question. There may be tricks that allow you to say a few things sort of that sound vaguely like an answer, but if you can answer any question at the level of a not very good expert, you have to understand the question. So, an example I like is this. Suppose I say to a chatbot, 'I saw the Grand Canyon flying to Chicago.' And the chatbot says, 'That can't be right. The Grand Canyon's much too big to fly to Chicago.' And I say, 'No, no, no, no. It was me flying to Chicago. While I was flying to Chicago, I saw the Grand Canyon.' And the chatbot says, 'Oh, I see. I misunderstood you.' So, if it misunderstood when it thought the Grand Canyon was flying to Chicago, what's it doing when it gets it right? It's understanding.

We have to think that they're very like us.

They're beings like us.

Um, 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, except, 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, and in particular, because we're making these new beings, it's going to completely change our view of what people are.

Um, 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.