Artificial Consciousness
This opinion(!) of mine is hardly brief internally, but I will attempt to summarize it here. Both for the sake of my own ‘record’ and for the sake of argument (quotes optional).
My thesis up front is that our current(2024) conception of ‘intelligence’ is severely flawed, incriminating entirely different ideas in the wake of our hype bubble, notably ‘understanding’, ‘awareness’, and the coup de grace: ‘consciousness’. My thesis ends in saying that we (scientists, engineers, philosophers, grifters, whoever) are not even fucking close to an artificial (read: computer) but supremely intelligent, conscious being. Which is the Red Scare of our heyday called AGI: Artificial General Intelligence.
I begin in saying that consciousness, and its’ subsequent awareness, and its’ subsequent understanding are prerequisites for supreme intelligence, meaning a general intelligence beyond and thus likely inconceivable too (another discussion entirely) by humans. I have common ground here with the apparent ‘scientifically ex-communicated’ physicist Roger Penrose on these terms and their building blocks toward true general intelligence, even if its general but dumb (awareness –> understanding –> intelligence).
If we define intelligence only relative to any given task or set of tasks at hand, then I argue our conception of ‘general’ is not very broad and in my view, not truly general. In so long as we are able to generate an exahustive list of these general tasks, then it is achievable indeed, but certainly not an impressive feat of consciousness, rather an feat of exhaustive man- and processor-power.
