![]() If we have artificial general intelligence, intelligence that’s capable of flexibly connecting ideas across different domains and maybe having something like sensory experience, what I want to know is whether it would be conscious or if it would all just be computing in the dark-engaging in things like visual recognition tasks from a computational perspective and thinking sophisticated thoughts, but not truly being conscious. In fact, there’s not a moment of your waking life in which you’re not a conscious being. Conscious experience is very familiar to you. When you see the rich hues of a sunset or smell the aroma of your morning coffee, you’re having conscious experience. As AI gets more sophisticated, one thing that I’ve been very interested in is whether the beings that we might create could have conscious experiences.Ĭonscious experience is the felt quality of your mental life. ![]() In particular, I’ve been thinking about the future of the mind and how AI technology might reshape the human mind and create synthetic minds. Lately, I’ve been thinking about these issues in relation to emerging technologies. I think about the fundamental nature of the mind and the nature of the self. SUSAN SCHNEIDER holds the Distinguished Scholar chair at the Library of Congress and is the director of the AI, Mind and Society (“AIMS”) Group at the University of Connecticut. ![]() At what point will you even be you? When you think about enhancing the brain, the idea is to improve your life-to make you smarter, or happier, maybe even to live longer, or have a sharper brain as you grow older-but what if those enhancements change us in such drastic ways that we’re no longer the same person? Suppose that you add a microchip to enhance your working memory, and then years later you add another microchip to integrate yourself with the Internet, and you just keep adding enhancement after enhancement. I’m thinking, for example, of theories of the nature of the person in the field of metaphysics. Many of the issues at stake here involve classic philosophical problems that have no easy solutions. The future of the mind should be a cultural decision and an individual decision. One thing that worries me about all this is that don't think AI companies should be settling issues involving the shape of the mind. There is also this idea that we should “merge with AI”-that in order for humans to keep up with developments in AI and not succumb to hostile superintelligent AIs or AI-based technological unemployment, we need to enhance our own brains with AI technology. I see many misunderstandings in current discussions about the nature of the mind, such as the assumption that if we create sophisticated AI, it will inevitably be conscious.
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