Related papers: On the evolutionary cognitive pressure for experie…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The question of whether artificial beings or machines could become self-aware or consciousness has been a philosophical question for centuries. The main problem is that self-awareness cannot be observed from an outside perspective and the…

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…

Could an AI have conscious experiences? Any answer to this question should conform to Evidentialism - that is, it should be based not on intuition, dogma or speculation but on solid scientific evidence. I argue that such evidence is hard to…

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 hypothesis of conscious machines has been debated since the invention of the notion of artificial intelligence, powered by the assumption that the computational intelligence achieved by a system is the cause of the emergence of…

While many see the prospect of autonomous machines as threatening, autonomy may be exactly what we want in a superintelligent machine. There is a sense of autonomy, deeply rooted in the ethical literature, in which an autonomous machine 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…

Are intelligent machines really intelligent? Is the underlying philosophical concept of intelligence satisfactory for describing how the present systems work? Is understanding a necessary and sufficient condition for intelligence? If a…

We demonstrate that if consciousness is relevant for the temporal evolution of a system's states--that is, if it is dynamically relevant--then AI systems cannot be conscious. That is because AI systems run on CPUs, GPUs, TPUs or other…

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…

We look at consciousness through the lens of Theoretical Computer Science, a branch of mathematics that studies computation under resource limitations, distinguishing functions that are efficiently computable from those that are not. From…

Did natural consciousness and intelligent systems arise out of a path that was co-evolutionary to evolution? Can we explain human self-consciousness as having risen out of such an evolutionary path? If so how could it have been? In this…

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…

In order to construct an ethical artificial intelligence (AI) two complex problems must be overcome. Firstly, humans do not consistently agree on what is or is not ethical. Second, contemporary AI and machine learning methods tend to be…

As AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, questions about machine consciousness and its ethical implications have moved from fringe speculation to mainstream academic debate. Current ethical frameworks in this domain often implicitly…