Anterovium/Alamy
Will we ever be able to tell if an AI gains consciousness?
Nick Canning
Coleraine, County Londonderry, UK
There is still no agreement among philosophers, biologists, neuroscientists and computer scientists over what properties unambiguously identify consciousness.
There is still uncertainty over attributing consciousness to species distantly related to us by evolution, which produced our own consciousness. So, a prospective machine with human-like artificial general intelligence, which wouldn’t be the product of biologically embodied evolution, may be qualitatively different from anything we would recognise as conscious.
Even if a machine could think creatively about problems we set it, and pass the …
