Ask A Genius 1022: False Consciousness to Conscious AI
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/25
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Rick Rosner: We’ve talked about it numerous times now: AI will claim to be conscious well before it’s anything like what we would consider conscious. But its claims will probably be qualitatively similar in terms of their output as it goes from not being conscious and claiming to be conscious to being pretty conscious.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We could discuss what behaviours might emerge as AI goes from falsely claiming to be conscious to being conscious.
Rosner: Well, I don’t have any information on that. It’ll be easier to see AI as conscious when AI has agency, especially when AI has little robots and scooters that it can use to have some agency, to move around, and to do things. If it’s engineered, we’ll certainly engineer some AIs to protect their physical integrity because we spent money on them and don’t want them to be destroyed willy-nilly.
Also, we should do that because it will seem nicer to us, though the idea of niceness when engineering what AIs want to do requires a lot of philosophizing and some skepticism. You have to decide whether a sufficiently developed AI will also develop a drive for self-preservation, probably in many cases. Then you have to decide whether it’s nice to make AIs want to save themselves instead of AIs being cool with being just turned off and going off to oblivion. It’s a big area, and I don’t want to talk about it much beyond that right now.
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It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
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