David Chalmers was not expecting the invitation he received in September of last year. As a leading authority on consciousness, Chalmers regularly circles the world delivering talks at universities and academic meetings to rapt audiences of philosophers—the sort of people who might spend hours debating whether the world outside their own heads is real and then go blithely about the rest of their day. This latest request, though, came from a surprising source: the organizers of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), a yearly gathering of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence. 

… Chalmers was an eminently sensible choice to speak about AI consciousness. He’d earned his PhD in philosophy at an Indiana University AI lab, where he and his computer scientist colleagues spent their breaks debating whether machines might one day have minds. In his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind, he spent an entire chapter arguing that artificial consciousness was possible. 

If he had been able to interact with systems like LaMDA and ChatGPT back in the ’90s, before anyone knew how such a thing might work, he would have thought there was a good chance they were conscious, Chalmers says. But when he stood before a crowd of NeurIPS attendees in a cavernous New Orleans convention hall, clad in his trademark leather jacket, he offered a different assessment. Yes, large language models—systems that have been trained on enormous corpora of text in order to mimic human writing as accurately as possible—are impressive. But, he said, they lack too many of the potential requisites for consciousness for us to believe that they actually experience the world. — Read More