It’s a lengthy debate that made headlines this weekend: will artificial intelligence (AI) ever be conscious, or is it already?
OpenAI Top Researcher Ilya Susteekever took Twitter to explain his view and saw a backlash of many scientists in the field, as first observed for futurism.
The question remains: who is right?
AI is conscious, says Sutskever
It all started when Sutskever tweeted on Thursday, “It may be that today’s large neural networks are little conscious.” This might seem like a fairly innocuous statement, but it was immediately and quickly met with backlash.
Why? According to UNSW Sidney AI researcher Toby Walsh, it is due to the fact the subject derails the conversation and possibly even the evolution of AI. “Every time such speculative comments get an airing, it takes months of effort to get the conversation returned to the greater realistic opportunities and threats posed through AI,” tweeted Walsh.
Independent sociotechnologist Jürgen Geuter in addition called the view unrealistic. He tweeted that “it may additionally be that this take has no basis in fact and is only a sales pitch to claim magical tech skills for a startup that runs quite simple statistics, just a lot of them.”
The associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen shared Geuter’s thoughts. “There could be teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth & Mars,” he quipped. “Indeed, that seems more reasonable than Ilya’s musing, because the apparatus for orbit exists and we have good definitions of teapots.
Is it just hype?
The Vice President of Citi and the Expert for Depth Learning, Valentino Zocca added that AI is not aware, but apparently the hype is more important than anything else.
But is the backlash warranted? Sure, claims that AI can be or can also additionally turn out to be aware do stir up fears in humans of the technology taking up however if the records show that the technology can be certainly advancing to that level is it now no longer worth mentioning?
The issue, however, appears to lie withinside the truth that AI is not on the point of being aware and might never be. Starting it’s far so, can also additionally consequently alarm humans who’ve no reason for worry. This can be one of these instances wherein time will screen who was right and who was wrong.