Related papers: If consciousness is dynamically relevant, artifici…
Whether current or near-term AI systems could be conscious is a topic of scientific interest and increasing public concern. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing…
Ever since the creation of the first artificial intelligence (AI) machinery built on machine learning (ML), public society has entertained the idea that eventually computers could become sentient and develop a consciousness of their own. As…
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have achieved human-scale speed and accuracy for classification tasks. In turn, these capabilities have made AI a viable replacement for many human activities that at their core involve…
The consciousness standing for artificial intelligence divides opinions across epistemological positions. Whether or not machines can be conscious, and whether we can ascertain the truth of such a proposition for any given case, has…
Insofar as consciousness has a functional role in facilitating learning and behavioral control, the builders of autonomous AI systems are likely to attempt to incorporate it into their designs. The extensive literature on the ethics of AI…
If we take the subjective character of consciousness seriously, consciousness becomes a matter of "being" rather than "doing". Because "doing" can be dissociated from "being", functional criteria alone are insufficient to decide whether a…
We here analyse the question of developing artificial consciousness from an evolutionary perspective, taking the evolution of the human brain and its relation with consciousness as a reference model. This kind of analysis reveals several…
As language-based AI systems become more anthropomorphic, the question of whether they can have subjective experience is increasingly pressing. I focus here on the tractability of research questions in the space of AI consciousness. I argue…
In AI, the existential risk denotes the hypothetical threat posed by an artificial system that would possess both the capability and the objective, either directly or indirectly, to eradicate humanity. This issue is gaining prominence in…
In this report, we argue that there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future. That means that the prospect of AI welfare and moral patienthood, i.e. of AI systems with…
Developments in machine learning and computing power suggest that artificial general intelligence is within reach. This raises the question of artificial consciousness: if a computer were to be functionally equivalent to a human, being able…
As artificially intelligent systems become more anthropomorphic and pervasive, and their potential impact on humanity more urgent, discussions about the possibility of machine consciousness have significantly intensified, and it is…
Interactions with large language models have led to the suggestion that these models may soon be conscious. From the perspective of neuroscience, this position is difficult to defend. For one, the inputs to large language models lack the…
Could artificial intelligence ever become truly conscious in a functional sense; this paper explores that open-ended question through the lens of Life, a concept unifying classical biological criteria (Oxford, NASA, Koshland) with empirical…
This paper critically assesses the anti-functionalist stance on consciousness adopted by certain advocates of integrated information theory (IIT), a corollary of which is that human-level artificial intelligence implemented on conventional…
The deep neural nets of modern artificial intelligence (AI) have not achieved defining features of biological intelligence, including abstraction, causal learning, and energy-efficiency. While scaling to larger models has delivered…
The discourse on risks from advanced AI systems ("AIs") typically focuses on misuse, accidents and loss of control, but the question of AIs' moral status could have negative impacts which are of comparable significance and could be realised…
Explainability and comprehensibility of AI are important requirements for intelligent systems deployed in real-world domains. Users want and frequently need to understand how decisions impacting them are made. Similarly it is important to…
Consciousness is notoriously hard to define with objective terms. An objective definition of consciousness is critically needed so that we might accurately understand how consciousness and resultant choice behaviour may arise in biological…
There is a general concern that present developments in artificial intelligence (AI) research will lead to sentient AI systems, and these may pose an existential threat to humanity. But why cannot sentient AI systems benefit humanity…