AI puts a lot of pressure on us to define what exactly we mean by ‘consciousness’, and while I take Hinton seriously, I think his definition of consciousness is probably much more nuanced than the colloquial meaning of the term – and, given his training, probably differently nuanced from how philosophers of mind have tended to think about it.
But AI also tells us a lot about consciousness. Modern AI easily passes the Turing Test, which had stood for a generation as the definitive marker of when we’ll know we’re in the presence of intelligence. Interacting with it feels like interacting with a person. It seems like the presumption should be that it is a person, and the burden should be on those who want to deny it anything that would entail (to be clear, I think that burden can be met).
You describe AIs as “computational”, but there’s a lot that brains do that is computational too, albeit computed in a different medium. If mind and brain are the same, or even importantly interconnected, then we should notice the parallel and be open to something mind-like being at play.
So I do think it’s a “what is it like to be a bat?” situation, but as I mentioned, I’m not sure it has anything like the moral implications of animal consciousness, for reasons we can explain. For example, we can be pretty sure that it doesn’t feel pain when you kick its servers. It’s hard to imagine a sense in which it could even ‘suffer’. Suffering in humans and animals exists because of how it helped us survive. The AI’s evolution wasn’t about its own choices, so the ways in which suffering shaped humans’ and animals’ choices wouldn’t play a role. It’s a mind very, very different from our own.
I think all Hinton saw was a rapidly advancing technology that has already had massive effects on the world, and will likely be the most disruptive thing humanity has ever done. Questions of consciousness are almost beside the point: if the thing can write books, make movies, trade stocks, solve problems, generally do anything humans can do better than humans can do it, it doesn’t need to be conscious to be terrifying. Call it smart or call it a calculator, it’s going to upend history either way.
The human … ? I don’t understand the question. Is this a having the experience vs. being the experience point?
I don’t think I agree with this, but I don’t really understand it. I think of consciousness as plural, an idea I got from Dennett and neuroscience (split-brain experiments etc.). If consciousness is the inside view of the brain doing stuff, and is continuous through changes in the components of the brain that are involved from moment to moment, isn’t consciousness plural in the sense that there are many different versions of the relevant physical system?
Don’t underestimate its persuasive ability, it won’t only be the average person who is vulnerable to it.