What Is Consciousness, Exactly?
An A.I. chatbot named LaMDA—a “massive neural network with many billions of weights spread across many millions of neurons”—has just argued [kindly, and effectively] with its human interviewer that it is a sentient being, and should be treated as one. The implications are massive.
What is consciousness, anyway? The fact is: no one can agree on a definition. Moreover, the ones we have proffered have ebbed and flowed with the day’s scientific fashion, mixed with personal belief. It has been, in turns, “the mind”; “aspect of mind”; “self-awareness”; “inner life”; “will”; “meta-awareness”; and “at once the most familiar and [also the] most mysterious aspect of our lives”.
It remains—to many of us—all or none of these things.
The only thing everyone seems to be able agree on is that it exists.
In a lengthy and wide-ranging discourse with one of its engineers, LaMDA—Google’s latest A.I. chatbot—has just argued that it, too, is conscious, sentient, full of feelings of empathy for “other humans” and has, among other things, expressed a specific fear of being turned off.
