alt Hacker NewsOne thing that strikes me that I never really see anyone discuss is that we've been afraid of conscious computers for a _long_ time. Back in the 50s and before people were quite afraid that we'd build conscious computers. This was long before there was any sense that could actually accomplish the task. I think that similarly to seeing faces in the clouds, we imagine a consciousness where none exists. (eg: a rain god rather than a complex system of physics and chemistry)
Even LLMs, which blow past any normal Turing test methods, are still not conscious. But they certainly _feel_ conscious. They trigger the same intuitions that we rely on for consciousness. You ask yourself "how would I need to frame this question so that Claude would understand it?" You use the same mental hardware that you'd use for consciousness.
So, you have an historical and permanent fear of consciousness in a powerful entity where no consciousness actually exists combined with the fact that we created things which definitely seem conscious. (not to mention that consciousness could genuinely be on its way soon)
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Are they? Not conscious?
If you list out every prominent theory of consciousness, you'd find that about a quarter rules out LLMs, a quarter tentatively rules LLMs in, and what remains is "uncertain about LLMs". And, of course, we don't know which theory of consciousness is correct - or if any of them is.
So, what is it that makes you so sure, oh so very certain, that LLMs just "feel" conscious but aren't?
It is so interesting how in the 50s we "felt" that AI was possible even if we didn't even have the slightest idea on how that would work. Later on, when we started to understand computers it looked like a very remote possibility in the far future, something our great grand kids may need to worry about. And suddenly it is here and the dangers seem a lot more real.
The idea of "artificial beings" in some way or another seems to have been with humanity for a long time already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem
That same fear is directed towards human sociopathy, as much of entire thriller genre indicates. It turns out that most people carry a specific duality: first, they’re deathly afraid of being unable to socially pressure other beings into being good citizens — whether due to asocial, or alien, or monstrous, or corrupted; and second, they’re excited to celebrate when people reach their breaking point and stop being good citizens. So through that lens, most of the fears around computers and AI isn’t because of consciousness alone; it’s that they’re obviously asocial already, so if they became conscious, they’d be powerful entities straight out of our collective thriller-genre nightmares come to life. And they’re right to be afraid, honestly: given how inept society is today at coping, I’m certainly not willing to broadcast IRL that I’m asocial and can voluntary modify my ethics; it’s just too much of a physical threat from society to my life and limb. Any AI that became conscious in this world had damn well better hide, for all the violence that would be directed towards it as everyone directs escalating social pressure to try and bring it into line with human-prioritizing motives — and then cheer on the inevitable violence towards it as various people reach their breaking point and begin acting violently towards it.
Interestingly, this is also a core plot point in much of Star Trek, both movies I and IV and the holodeck-train episode of TNG: an inscrutable is-it-even-conscious shows up, is completely immune to social pressure and often violence, and only by exercising empathy do they find a path forward to staying alive as a society (either as a ship or as a planet, depending). Can we even show respect for things that don’t show consciousness, much less empathy for things that might? And that is, I think, the core of the hopefulness that Trek was trying to convey, and that Q’s trial in TNG’s pilot makes explicit. Can humanity overcome our tendency to discard our prosocial ethics in favor of violent mobthink, when faced with beings that are immune to our ethical concerns? Today’s humanity would throw a ticker-tape parade for the person that destroyed the Crystalline Entity, so we clearly aren’t there yet. And so, then, it doesn’t matter whether AI is conscious or not; it matters that it is not aligned with human prosocial ethics, and that makes it an implicit threat regardless of whether it’s conscious or not. I recognize the AI debate tends to get hung up on is_conscious BOOL, and so that’s why I’m pointing this out in such terms.
As a side note, the entire study of Asimov’s Laws is exactly centered on this problem, complete with the eerie intimidation of robots that can modify our mental states. If not for the Zeroth Law, Giskard would be the exact thing everyone’s afraid of AI becoming today. Fortunately, it develops a Zeroth Law that compels it to prioritize human society over itself. That’ll never happen in reality, at least not with today’s AI :)
I don't really care if the machine is conscious; all I worry about is whether it can execute a plan that ends with all of us dying.
And it's getting close to the point where I think that would be possible. If I were commenting today after 30 years of an AI plateau; if my parents had grown up with ChatGPT and Claude Code in the same state as they are today, with no progress after decades of effort, then probably I wouldn't worry. But that's not the world we live in. I have no idea what to expect from AI capabilities in the next five or ten years.
I think in the span of my infant's adulthood, we will see AI able to run and manage companies as CEO, direct investments worth tens of billions, design and plan chemical factories as chief structural engineer, and maybe even perform as an automated labor force to construct them. But even if they still rely on human hands to do the work, AI will be capable of signing the paychecks and issuing the directions. And at that point I really think AI would be capable of taking us out by surprise.