Nautil.us: Here’s How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious

Here’s How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious

“Our conscious experiences are composed of qualia, the subjective aspects of sensation—the redness of red, the sweetness of sweet. The qualia that compose conscious experiences are irreducible, incapable of being mapped onto anything else. If I were born blind, no one, no matter how articulate, would ever be able to give me a sense of the color blood and roses share.”

“The 21st century is in dire need of a Turing test for consciousness. AI is learning how to drive cars, diagnose lung cancer, and write its own computer programs. Intelligent conversation may be only a decade or two away, and future super-AI will not live in a vacuum. It will have access to the Internet and all the writings of Chalmers and other philosophers who have asked questions about qualia and consciousness. But if tech companies beta-test AI on a local intranet, isolated from such information, they could conduct a Turing-test style interview to detect whether questions about qualia make sense to the AI.”