Geoffrey Hinton on AI consciousness
From AI Godfather Geoffrey Hinton: AI Is Conscious, Superintelligence is Coming, And We Should Be Worried · · Alex Kantrowitz
“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 um let's be honest with each other each other are you testing me cuz the chatbots have this habit of playing dumb when they're being tested so you don't know how smart they are. Um 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.”
On , Geoffrey Hinton, Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto, spoke about AI consciousness during AI Godfather Geoffrey Hinton: AI Is Conscious, Superintelligence is Coming, And We Should Be Worried on Alex Kantrowitz.
About Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Hinton has stated in multiple recent interviews that he believes advanced AI systems are already conscious, a view he said he rarely emphasizes because it "puts people off from the other safety messages." He argued that chatbots demonstrate genuine understanding, dismissing the "stochastic parrot" claim as "complete nonsense" and asserting that "you can't answer a question unless you understand the question." Hinton described the current model of consciousness as "as wrong as the belief that people were designed by God" and predicted that creating digital intelligences will "completely change our view of what people are." He noted that researchers themselves use language implying awareness, such as describing a chatbot as "aware that it was being tested." Hinton has expressed unhappiness with the trajectory of AI development, citing risks including massive unemployment and the long-term danger of systems becoming much smarter than humans with no clear way for less intelligent beings to control them. He criticized large publicly traded companies, saying they have "a fiducial duty to try and maximize the profits for shareholders" rather than to avoid harming humanity, and argued that "we should be doing intelligent design of these beings, not letting the invisible hand of economic competition design them." Compared to a year or two earlier, Hinton said he is more optimistic about the possibility of designing AI systems that "care about us" or that function only