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ASK AN AI-powered chatbot if it is conscious and, most of the time, it will answer in the negative. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 have personal desires, or consciousness,鈥� writes OpenAI鈥檚 ChatGPT. 鈥淚 am not sentient,鈥� chimes in Google鈥檚 Bard chatbot. 鈥淔or now, I am content to help people in a variety of ways.鈥�

For now? AIs seem open to the idea that, with the right additions to their architecture, consciousness isn鈥檛 so far-fetched. The companies that make them feel the same way. And according to , a philosopher at New York University, we have no solid reason to rule out some form of inner experience emerging in silicon transistors. 鈥淣o one knows exactly what capacities consciousness necessarily goes along with,鈥� he said at the in Sicily in May.

So just how close are we to sentient machines? And if consciousness does arise, how would we find out?

What we can say is that unnervingly intelligent behaviour has already emerged in these AIs. The large language models (LLMs) that underpin the new breed of chatbots can write computer code and can seem to reason: they can tell you a joke and then explain why it is funny, for instance. They can even do mathematics and write top-grade university essays, said Chalmers. 鈥淚t鈥檚 hard not to be impressed, and a little scared.鈥�

But simply scaling up LLMs is unlikely to lead to consciousness, as they are little more than powerful prediction machines (see 鈥淗ow does ChatGPT work and do AI-powered chatbots 鈥渢hink鈥� like us?鈥�). Bigger data sets and more complex circuits make these AIs increasingly intelligent, but that doesn鈥檛 mean that they experience anything, says cognitive scientist and philosopher at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. 鈥淓xperience is like going through rather than just knowing about.鈥�

With that said, researchers are already trying to recreate experience in AIs. These days, the idea that our minds are shaped by our bodies and senses, known as embodied cognition, is orthodox. So one approach is to meld LLMs with robot bodies that can see and hear too, said Chalmers. Indeed, Google recently revealed an AI-powered robot that can sense and engage with its environment. The wonders of embodiment enabled PaLM-E to deliver a packet of crisps to its owner, despite the packet having been hidden in a drawer midway through the experiment.

Embodied intelligence

As welcome as robotic snack deliveries are, Ciaunica suspects that the computer code at the heart of PaLM-E鈥檚 existence isn鈥檛 actually 鈥渆xperiencing鈥� anything at all. Our minds and bodies have evolved side by side over millions of years. Simply sticking robots together with sophisticated artificial minds and then expecting them to become conscious is the wrong approach, she says.

Deep-learning pioneer , meanwhile, takes his lead from ideas around how information is processed in the brain. 鈥淐onsciousness is not magical, it鈥檚 material,鈥� he says. His lab at the University of Montreal in Canada applies 鈥済lobal workspace theory鈥� to AIs. This is the idea that consciousness arises when many diverse brain functions are recruited onto a central stage in order to solve problems. By squeezing an AI鈥檚 many modules through a bottleneck, he aims to create something like this stage on silicon chips. 鈥淚t could lead to AIs that have many of the cognitive functions associated with consciousness,鈥� says Bengio.

Yet the metaphor of the brain as a computer misses an essential difference between software and living organisms, says at the University of Tartu in Estonia. Along with experience comes the urge to keep existing and so, unlike computers, living organisms have something to lose. 鈥淐onsciousness might depend on having 鈥榮kin in the game鈥�,鈥� Aru and his colleagues wrote in a .

Bengio counters this with the claim that have appeared in AIs that are rewarded for taking certain actions over others. This kind of behaviour reinforcement at first creates an 鈥渋nnate drive鈥� that is similar to human survival instincts, says Bengio. As AIs are subjected to richer social lives, there is nothing to stop the kinds of emotions that we experience in our own social lives from emerging, he says.

Why the mind-body connection is vital to understanding consciousness

The key to solving the hard problem of consciousness could lie in the body not the brain, with our gut and heart being key players in building our conscious experience

Ultimately, how conscious you think AIs will become depends on your preferred theory of consciousness. For panpsychists, who believe that mind is an intrinsic property of all matter, AIs have always been conscious on some level 鈥� as have electrons, rocks and mayonnaise. And until we know what consciousness is, there is no solid way of testing for it. Computer scientist Alan Turing鈥檚 famous 鈥渋mitation game鈥� highlighted conversational ability as the benchmark for testing whether machines are thinking. But the success of chatbots suggests this would be a test of intelligence rather than sentience, said Chalmers.

Perhaps the relevant question isn鈥檛 whether or not AIs can become conscious, but why we would want them to be conscious. 鈥淲e should avoid trying to build machines that are in our image,鈥� says Bengio. 鈥淚t鈥檒l be healthier if we keep AIs in their roles of tools, rather than as agents, like people. They would not play the same kind of social role that humans play in society as they would essentially be immortal.鈥�

This story is part of a series in which we explore the most pressing questions about artificial intelligence. Read the other articles below

How does ChatGPT work and do AI-powered chatbots 鈥渢hink鈥� like us? | What generative AI really means for the economy, jobs and education 触听Forget human extinction 鈥� these are the real risks posed by AI today听触听How to use AI to make your life simpler, cheaper and more productive 触听The biggest scientific challenges that AI is already helping to crack

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