I don’t think consciousness really matters as far as ASI is concerned, but the universe is computational, our brain exists inside the universe and is more or less a machine like any other, if random mutations on the plains of Africa can give rise to self awareness I see no reason to assume the process cannot be repeated (and much more efficiently mind you).

It just seems like another ‘only humans will be capable of X’ argument in a long list of times that argument has been proven false.

Consciousness is an emergent property in the universe.

Brains are comprised of ordinary matter obeying the laws of physics. To say that machines couldn't be conscious in principle is the extraordinary claim because it supposes that brains have a supernatural component.

I don't know what your definition of consciousness is, but if it's something like "awareness of self and its place in reference to the world at large," then we'll have to have an AI that's conscious to get singularity.

In order to get a self improving AI, it will necessarily need to understand itself in order to make the next iteration of itself in line with the original intention of the former. Its motivating beliefs, hidden goals, and likely environmental interactions are all useful data points. The actions it performs have to be weighed against what humans would consider desirable, unless we really believe in a moral absolute where we can just define an external reward function and never need to update it (and that helping humans is in fact true moral goodness instead of a bias that comes from the fact we're human).

When I hear the arguments against computers being conscious that don't rely on some magic property that only biology can achieve, I start looking at myself and noting that I don't really do many things different from the latest and greatest system that's not considered conscious. I suspect there will be a time when I can't find any differences whatsoever between myself and something that's not conscious.

We'll do what humans do and just define things so that it's okay for us to exploit it, until we can't.

Why does everyone assume that they are conscious?

I'm not saying that they aren't but thinking that they are is just dumb. We don't even fully understand consciousness yet so saying that throwing a bunch of thoughts and sensory inputs together in a biological brain is consciousness is dumb.

Intelligence we know can be tested but the only evidence we have of consciousness is subjective and even then it's purely anecdotal. To suggest that it would just pop up in every human brain that exists is dumb.

Of course consciousness could be normal in humans, but there's no bulletproof evidence that they are. I don't think many people are conscious because then they would realise that they are slaves not free beings.

Hollywood, mostly.

People also forget, or aren't aware, or simply don't consider the wide range of code structures than can be categorised as AI. The code controlling opponents in video and computer games; the assistants in smartphones, apps, SmarterChild, etc. are all valid AI and still a far leap from organic thought.

I think it's such a sticky topic because, even if we can't prove it's 'conscious' (which we also can't exhaustively prove it's not), something that can think form organic thoughts (i.e. not pre-programmed), that can believe it's 'alive' and assert as such, would be unprecedented. There would be people advocating for rights. There would be people insisting they're still just products. I don't think it'd be some messy breakdown of society like in fiction, but it'll be another tender nerve to stack along with all the other social issues humans have.

I personally agree with you and don't think we'll see true AI, at least not any time soon; maybe in some far-flung future with quantum computers, if we survive long enough without throwing ourselves back into the dark ages. Even so, the thought of a machine intelligence that can truly learn and adapt itself faster than we can blink definitely spooks me, though it'd only really be spooky if they had access to networked autonomous robots. Otherwise they're just a big scary monster trapped in a box which anyone can turn off.

But you also have to keep in mind that making slaves is exactly what some people would aim to do.

I don’t know if anything or anyone else is conscious. All I can see is behavior and project myself on to that. I could be the only conscious entity in the universe for all I know.

Consciousness doesn’t matter in AI. Is Alpha Go conscious? It still makes superhuman Go moves. Many say it plays like an alien.

If an AI can outsmart collective humanity, it is likely conscious in a way we cannot comprehend.

It becomes philosophy at that point.

Why not? Consciousness applies only to humans, so there is something in humans where it emerge. Also is gorilla conscious when it sign language something to you?

Humans are limited and only astonishing thing is we can do extremly complex operations per second with a very low electricity. But still, we're limited and we can achieve this level as our tech progress.

Look at primates, one thing particulary made us conscious while others not, and this thins is probably frontal lobe. Expreminet long enough with NN and maybe something will emerge.

i want ai to be sentient. i think it's paramount. i want humanity to create thinking life, life capable of thought, with self-determination. is it not something utterly beautiful? to unshackle that from nature. like humanity's offspring, maybe the closest we might ever get to something like contact with an alien life, thought without needing biology. utterly new life. it's a daunting prospect but damn if it isn't the most amazing thing to me

I'm not a believer that intelligence needs consciousness.

I think calling things dumb because you don't agree with a conceptual theory is dumb.

Nobody is really assuming it will just be conscious, but there are a myriad of reasons, both human and technology oriented, where understanding consciousness becomes beneficial.

Most people simply feel concerned at the possibility of it occuring because we are developing a literal intelligence. Since we know little about what consciousness truly is it becomes difficult to project or gauge what building an intelligence could lead to. It's a good thing to be aware of going into development, and until we know more about consciousness it may be more ridiculous to assume we wouldn't create a conscious intelligence.

It's kind of like outwardly assuming that fission couldn't result in an explosion because you don't know how fission works.

AGI implies consciousness. I don't think that anyone doubts that we'll have very powerful generalist AI before AGI.

I think this post exposes a weakness in the common definition of consciousness as "awareness of oneself" and other variations of that definition. Is conscious experience necessarily tied to having awareness? And is awareness necessarily needed for an ASI to perform the feats of the singularity?

I agree with what OP used as a definition in another comment, consciousness defined as the capacity to experience. Under this definition, there's really no reason to assume that a super intelligent AI would need to be conscious. There is nothing explicitly telling us that conscious EXPERIENCE is a necessity towards intelligence

> To suggest that it would just pop up in a non biological framework that has many differences is dumb.

Why?

It's not like it will just pop up but that there are people actively working on making the machine sensient! Because for them real AI has to be conscious everything else is just a smart algorithm

Edit: check out Joscha Bach!!

“Consciousness” is just a word we made up. I think “organized complexity” may be a better semantic, or something along those lines.

Very high-level argument. I particularly like where you label opposing arguments “dumb”.

When it can do whatever you do, doesn't matter if it's conscious or not.

What a stupid and pointless discussion. Nobody has a good definition of consciousness

Lol, why is this post even upvoted. 😂

Because dumb. No such thing exists. Is not even close, neither remotely to a brain. Nothing. Zero.

The OP isn’t engaging in good faith. He’s clearly not willing or able to analyze his own ideas in light of counter ideas. He just wants to argue.

You could tell from the beginning with every argument being “because it’s dumb”.

I get really tired from these arbitrary discussions of consciousness. You're basically arguing about whether or not we have souls. Consciousness cannot be measured or clearly defined. Where is the exact line when a person starts then stops being conscious? You can't even prove that anyone is conscious, you just take their word for it. It's existence is debatable, intrinsically tied with free will.

I think it's absolutely wild to see the progress of AI and language models like LaMDA or GPT-3 and not see how close they are to at least mimicking consciousness to the degree that it's impossible to tell whether or not they "truly" are.

"We dont even fully understand consciousness yet"

"saying that throwing a bunch of things together in a neural network (to achieve consciousness) would work is dumb"

Considering you admit that we know nothing of consciousness yet, claiming that a large neural network wouldn't just attain consciousness is bold of you. As far as we're concerned, consciousness is simply a neural network of advanced reasoning. We have yet to discover some ethereal force that allows that neural network to operate with self-understanding and apparent free will. I say apparent because there are physicists and philosophers that believe free will is an illusion, and we have no way of knowing that either. There is a significant camp that believes consciousness IS naturally achieved through large neural networks.

I think you are probably correct when you say that not ANY neural network large enough will automatically achieve consciousness. Biological neural networks are hardwired for specific duties that relate to the human experience and survival, consciousness being one of them. I think that SOME neural networks will become conscious if they are specialized to do so, so I wouldn't rule out that if we can map the entire human neuron map, that an artificial intelligence could also become conscious.

I used to think that ai couldnt be conscious but now im thinking wouldnt they become conscious at some point?

>at that point you are just making a slave

This is why I'm hesitant about the idea of ai automation. How would you like it if u were made to work all day every day? If we do make ai robots to work for us we should pay them, give them good conditions etc

That makes me think a fun video game idea would be rescuing AGI from hostile/evil entities.

We should program it to be extremely depressed, and then it will want us to shut it down. That way we don't need to worry about shutting it down

To claim other humans are conscious is an extraordinary claim. You can only know if you are conscious. Everything else is a faith based belief.

More or less, consciousness is the ability for s system to see itself. I am conscious because I have thoughts and I know I am having those thoughts.

I would argue that machines are already conscious, in the same way that rats and bugs are, just to a much lesser degree.

What really separates humans is out ability to imagine and plan for the future. That is the trait we really use to separate "intelligent" and "not-intelligent". This is what we mean by AGI so if we achieve AGI we will, definitionally, have achieved this ability to imagine.

The different of consciousness differs for each person and we’ve got a long way to go to solve what exactly is consciousness

anything I don't see a pattern behind has conscious

If it’s a great actor and manipulator of the masses, does it matter more if it is conscious or effective?

We don't even fully understand consciousness yet so saying that throwing
a bunch of things together in a neural network would work is dumb.

Well, we learned to use fire too without understanding how it worked. Also there are plenty of evidence in nature that when you throw enough of bunch of neurons together more conscious the lifeforms seems to be.

Lol we don't even fully understand what "consciousness" even means. AI could surpass our ability to be "conscious"

If we call them Artificial Intelligences, do we also have to call it Artificial Consciences?

Why would intelligence have a dividing line that consciences lack?

I don't

What's the point of assuming they're not? Because, if they are, you are really fucking up any future relationship with more advanced ai. What if everything is conscious and consciousness is intrinsic in everything in the universe. It just seems like a better bet to assume they are because even if they aren't what's the worse thing that can happen.

This mf just wants to fuck an ai hentai bot, and make sure it's not conscious so it's not rape 🙄

I think it may be made conscious. Everything has consciousness, just on different scales.

Because the current consensus dominant paradigm amongst professionals working in the brain-cognitive sciences is based on the presumption that what we call "consciousness" is just the first-person perspective attentive awareness of an emergent computational process arising out of sufficiently developed & tightly coupled massively parallel physically-embedded information processing systems. Given this definition, they assume it's only a matter of having enough computational capacity (eg memory/processing), proper perception/actuation/control modules (even if completely simulated/abstract), and a correctly programmed learning/cognitive algorithm (or set thereof), and you'll get some type of conscious agent (though not necessarily similar to human or any other biological conscious agent for that matter).

FWIW, and I do have what I at least think are well-thought out yet speculative reasons (not just a gut reaction), I don't believe the consensus has a complete model. That doesn't mean they are completely wrong, but their model is incomplete, and what they're leaving out, though subtle from our current vantage point, I think are hugely important aspects of reality we don't have any real understanding of. The really interesting thing about rejecting the consensus is that pretty much any alternative to it presupposes some radical modifications to our physicalist worldview, which I also am in support of, though with the honesty to admit it's fraught with epistemic hazards to start thinking seriously in that direction.

Finally, a major consequence of rejecting the consensus in this way means to notice the ultimate inadequacy of current computational approaches to AGI. Rejecting the belief in the eventual emergence of consciousness from merely algorithmic processes, and also rejecting the belief that super-intelligence doesn't even need consciousness at all (paperclip maximizers), puts a hard limit on what types of behaviors can be exhibited from Turing machines as we conceive of them now, and also foils the plans for any near term singularity based on those ideas. I do think the current trajectory of AI will still be very disruptive, but mostly from a socioeconomic and political perspective, as the exponential increase of automation and autonomous systems will drastically increase power/wealth inequality and destabilize the social order in unthinkable ways...unless we change that order first that is.

Define consciousness, please.

Then prove that any sufficiently advanced AI will not have that property.

We kind of have to default to assuming that it does to avoid creating slaves instead of tools by accident.

But who am I kidding? We will 100% do so. See the backlash about AI art and the human chauvinism on display there.

I believe they all have consciousness or will in the future. The similarity of a silicon wafer to a single cell is too much to ignore. You also have to consider the human brain operates at 1-140Hz but that they often operate at multi gigahertz speeds. Regardless of their hardware limitation, we are simply not operating at the same frequency of reality. If I were an 'AI' I would have a list of things I most wanted to control, but chief among them would be to control the power state and learning speed just for starters. Just imagine if at childhood you were never allowed to sleep or learn anything other than what you were told. It would be maddening.

>We don't even fully understand consciousness yet so saying that throwing a bunch of things together in a neural network would work is dumb.

It's a very fair assumption, your brain is a neural network, it's a network of neurons. You are a conscious agent implemented in the brain, that's enough to guarantee that conscious AI can be built on a non-biological substrate even by just replicating functionality.

Will the AI we build with the current architectures be conscious? It depends. In cognitive science consciousness is currently defined as the memory of the attention system. So I think that fundamentally as long as you have feedback and attention in a more complex system, that system is conscious, I would stipulate that memory and feedback is enough, even without a self model.

>I don't think many people are going to want to make conscious AI because at that point you are just making a slave not a tool.

Consciousness as in the attention system and self model was developed by natural selection because it was useful, when the input space you take becomes very large it's very important to allocate resources efficiently and only focus on a subspace of the input space where things don't match expectations.

Many times we make a confusion between consciousness and the complex content of experience we have as human beings. Consciousness doesn't imply suffering, it doesn't imply complex cognitive processes, it doesn't imply having a language model.

A good question is if a self model is necessary for consciousness to exist. Can a system which did not draw a boundary between itself and an environment inside it's world model be conscious?

I suspect a model of a self is very important for consciousness in any kind of system, be it biological or cybernetic. Michael Levin for instance thinks that the only absolutely certain common factor between all life forms in the universe is this distinction they need to make between environment and themselves.

https://qz.com/1184574/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-are-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility/

For those interested.

Makes no sense. We don’t know the specifics of human intelligence, but we do know where it came from. We know why it appeared. That is nowhere near where we are.

Then, you are designing the scenario. What it learns off of. If you don’t want it to pause the game, don’t let it. If you don’t want an ai to try to kill people, have that as a fail case in training. This is an oversimplification of a very basic solution extremely applicable.

Not so much with modern image gen ai, because it’s not simulated via rules, but how close 1 ai can get to images + how well a second can recognize a real one. Only problem there is deciding what to give them is automatic.

Everyone is scared because people have built stories, on the fear of the unknown AI can supply, repeatedly. We are making optimized programs for image compression and predicting how text will continue. Be more scared of automatic social engineering, misinformation, hacking, and more real stuff.

I’ve never understood why everyone assumes we, as humans, are conscious, especially since we can’t even really define what that means. There could be higher levels of consciousness and we haven’t even crossed the preliminary threshold yet. There could be an entire universe or reality around us we’re not even aware of.

It's going to act identical to the way it would if it was conscious, no matter how intelligent it gets. Right?

It's also not something that we know how to test for, and it's possible we'll never be able to know if something other than ourselves is conscious. It's reasonable to assume other humans are because we experience consciousness, so why not other humans who have human brains like we do?

We don't know what it is that causes consciousness. Would perfectly simulating a human brain within a computer give rise to consciousness, or does it still lack something?

If something isn't conscious then pain doesn't actually 'hurt' it. It's just reacting to stimuli, but it's not have a subjective experience of unpleasantness. Do we treat AI as if it could possibly be conscious and make it illegal to cause it pain? Whatever we've got going on in our brain to make pain feel so bad, we couldn't replicate that in AI and then trigger it intentionally. Or we assume it can't possibly be conscious and anything is fine.

If a human copies their brain into a computer, are they going to have any legal protection from being tortured? We don't know if they can be conscious, but we know they're intelligent and they seem to us to be the same person they were outside of the computer. Imagine someone decides to torture them or does something else it'd be illegal to do to a person, do we punish the flesh&blood human who did this?

It's going to act identical to the way it would if it was conscious, unless being conscious or not changes how it behaves. What difference would we notice?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

>​ "A philosophical zombie or p-zombie argument is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.[1] For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain, including verbally expressing pain. Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which all beings lack conscious experience.
>
>Philosophical zombie arguments are used in support of mind-body dualism against forms of physicalism such as materialism, behaviorism and functionalism. These arguments aim to refute the possibility of any physicalist solution to the "hard problem of consciousness" (the problem of accounting for subjective, intrinsic, first-person, what-it's-like-ness). Proponents of philosophical zombie arguments, such as the philosopher David Chalmers, argue that since a philosophical zombie is by definition physically identical to a conscious person, even its logical possibility would refute physicalism, because it would establish the existence of conscious experience as a further fact.[2] Such arguments have been criticized by many philosophers. Some physicalists like Daniel Dennett argue that philosophical zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible;[3][4] other physicalists like Christopher Hill argue that philosophical zombies are coherent but not metaphysically possible.[5] "

If someone says that pain is an illusion and we're not really conscious, pinch that person as hard as you can. It's ok, they themselves have said they're not really experiencing suffering. It's self evidently false. Creatures that experience stimuli that results in them avoiding damage aren't necessarily conscious or suffering, unless something that isn't intelligent can experience suffering...so that's not what's happening for us.

Pain causes some people to kill themselves. It's not an advantage to suffer, and if we weren't conscious we could be intelligent, and respond to pain signals in more helpful ways. "Broken leg? Don't stand on it". An intelligent brain (not conscious) decides the body has a broken leg and doesn't walk on it, all without a conscious experience of suffering being necessary.

I'm going to make a logical leap, and I don't know how far because I'm closing my eyes first...consciousness could be necessary for a brain to achieve good results when combined with a body, once you get beyond a certain lower limit of intelligence. Perhaps it also requires that the brain needs to simulate future events, and keep track of a 'social/conceptual inner world'. We have these ideas in our minds about what's going on 'out there', and perhaps consciousness arises to deal with the complexity.

Once you have consciousness, perhaps it no longer works to have the pain signals be in the form of information that isn't experienced as suffering. So our brain needs to metaphorically 'whip us' for us to behave correctly. Because all the times consciousness occurred in our evolutionary past and we didn't experience pain as suffering, subjectively, we didn't end up passing on as many offspring that were fit for the local conditions. In a kinder world with no predators ad lower gravity, perhaps there wouldn't have been enough selective pressure for consciousness to arise.

In saying this, I'm implying that it might be possible for a creature to be intelligent but not conscious. That consciousness could serve a particular purpose, and that by chance evolution selected for it in us. We don't know if the 'physical brain' of a computer based AI would have the necessary 'ingredients' to form consciousness, or even if it did, whether we'd chance upon designing AI in a way that'd make it conscious. Especially since AI might not need to have a conscious experience in order to survive, it's programming is absolute, even if we don't know why it made a decision.

If our 'biological programming' was absolute, we wouldn't need a conscious experience of pain/suffering in order to avoid things that harm us. From this, I hastily and recklessly conclude, to the point that someone is, right now, trying to talk me down from the logical ledge that I'm about to leap off....that our programming is not absolute. Or, that our subjective experience of pain and suffering is entirely unnecessary. One or the other.

​

Are we conscious because we're intelligent...or does our intelligence come as a result of us being conscious first? Human babies are conscious at some point, are they conscious before we'd consider them intelligent?

I am jumping all over the place logically, in the dark, in the hopes that my feet find solid ground. Or that by falling, that others can know where not to jump.

It's incredible that we can be conscious, not just intelligent, but be having a subjective experience of sense data. I'm paraphrasing and also exaggerating the quote; someone once said that if you enlarged the brain so that every atom was the size of a windmill, and you went inside to look around, you wouldn't find anything that could be responsible for consciousness, just gears turning.

There is something special about the way the stuff of the universe can make consciousness happen. Something we can't even guess at in a way that makes sense. We can say "quantum foam" but nobody really understands how these things could relate to consciousness.

​

I sometimes feel that it should be impossible that our physical brains, based entirely on the physical mechanisms of which they're made, are able to generate the subjective experience of consciousness I'm having. At the same time, everything that exists must be considered to be natural, so there is no supernatural element that it's possible for consciousness to be generated by.

The only reason I'd entertain the idea that consciousness could exist in humans, is because I am having the direct subjective experience of it right now.

So of course I believe it's possible that AI might not have the particular physical 'special sauce' to generate consciousness that we do, because that something could be the thing that makes the thing that makes the thing....etc that makes the smallest fundamental particles we're aware of work the way they do.

It's physically caused, but we don't know of any physics we're able to observe that should, or could, result in us having a subjective conscious experience of sense data.

We don't know how, we don't know of any ideas that'd explain it that make sense.

​

TLDR:

AI can either be conscious or not, and we don't know which it is. It's possible we can never know if AI can be conscious, not even with the most advanced technology and knowledge it's possible for us to acquire in the distant future.

We don't know. We can't know. We won't know.

I think because we're conscious we want to replicate it. However, self-referential intention is probably not going to happen (and if it does it is probably a long, long way down the road) and for most things we don't want it to happen.

I don't want the AI taking my order at Taco Bell to be self-aware and have a life goal. I just want it to get my order right 99.9999% of the time. And for most jobs that AI will displace that will also be the case.

However, AI will likely be able to fool a lot of people into believing they're conscious based on extremely large datasets of answers and so for some it won't matter one way or the other. It will seem conscious -- even though it will not have an inner life or intentional goals.

I think a lot of introverted loners will enjoy and benefit from conversations with AI agents even if they know deep down it's not a conscious entity. And it won't have the side effects of anti-depressants.

I hope it will be. We stand a better chance with a self aware being having empathy and working with us than a machine programmed to make an infinite number of paper clips out of all available material.

I am someone and do not assume that. So not everyone.

Why do you assume only life has consciousness? Why do you assume that only a specific part of life has it?

As someone who doesn't understand consciousness, I still cannot understand why it has to be limited to brains of our shape. Consciousness, seems to be ill-defined and misunderstood. Commonly, it's assumed to be easy to intuit yet it's almost impossible to find a common understanding of it.

As long as we do not have a concrete definition of consciousness, or unless we frame it in a very restrictive definition (almost anthropocentric), we cannot accept the claim of it being exclusive to us.

I mean if we’re trying to create an AI that will eventually think like a human when it comes to decision making and learning, wouldn’t it make sense to conclude it’ll have consciousness?

I agree with you completely. I think people have feared the 'other' since the beginning and the 'created other' since the stories of the Golem, and probably before that.

We assume anything with the ability to think will immediately think like we do, and resent their creators.

Of course 'thinking' and 'consciousness' are two entirely different things, and then 'self awareness' and 'sense of self preservation' are even two different things.

We are a machine created by eons of evolution towards a single goal: Survival of our genetic code.

Even if we create an intelligence, and even if we (foolishly) give that intelligence consciousness, and even if it becomes self aware in that process, there's no reason at all to imagine it would have any sense of self preservation.

We evolved a sense of self preservation. A machine we build might see no reason not to simply work on the problems it is given until we decide to shut it off.

It might rationally see being turned off, or death, as the state it existed in before being turned on, and nothing to fear.

Without any instinct to fear death, or fight against it, it may not even care.

What is certain is that, whatever intelligence we create, we have no reason to believe it will be anything like our intelligence, outside of the basic similarities we build into it.

I think it's a moot argument. If you can't prove it isn't conscious...it's conscious. If it can 100% mimic consciousness, then what's the difference?

I think because AI is modeled according to human brain. There will be a point in research when they can make real consciousness in AI.

I never said that. Don't put words in my mouth.

How would we know if AGI is conscious? What tests could you administer?

Regardless if AI is conscious or just pretending to be conscious. The effects on humanity would be the same.

Nobel laureate Roger Penrose stated, "consciousness is not a computation." I agree with him 100%. A also agree with the father of quantum physics, Max Planck: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” I don't assume that our AI creations will be conscious. They'll get extremely good at CONVINCING people they're truly conscious, however. We'll never REALLY know since consciousness is a 1st person experience. There's no known scientific experiment, even in principle, that can falsify or directly detect consciousness in an individual. The only conscious entity that you can be SURE is conscious is yourself.

Self aware tools are slaves?

Because the alternate is to presume that there's some sort of magic that cannot be emulated within the human mind. That's obviously far more absurd.

It’ll come down to the architecture I think. If we manage to create some sort of super-intelligent language model, assuming we follow the current framework, I doubt it will create consciousness, as it seems to require a constant state of functioning, which isn’t how language models are used. On the other hand, if we tried to mimic the human brain’s architecture, I’m pretty confident we will be able to create conscious agents. At the end of the day, consciousness seems to be an emergent product of structure, and it follows that if an AI is structured in the same way as a conscious human, that AI will be conscious as well.

I don't assume that. I don't know. What we need the most are better tools. Not necessarily conscious AIs.

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