The emergence of consciousness in artificial intelligence poses a problem as we may not fully understand how it emerges in physics and could wrongly attribute consciousness to machines that only seem conscious, but are not.
The answer depends on whether consciousness is fundamental or emerges at some point in physical processing. If consciousness is fundamental, then AI would have a non-human conscious experience, and if it emerges, then there may be a class of conscious experiences or organisms that can be anthropomorphized enough to give them rights.
By trying to engineer systems that closely interact with humans, our understanding of intelligence, consciousness, and free will deepens. The hope is to understand intelligence by building such systems and create the illusion of consciousness, thus learning more about these concepts.
In this podcast episode, the speaker discusses the possibility of taking consciousness and the question of free will from the realm of philosophy into the realm of science and engineering, and how it relates to intelligence.
This podcast episode discusses whether creating a conscious machine is necessary in order to create a rich experience, and the ethical implications of replicating consciousness in robots.