In case you haven't noticed, natural selection is the big deal. It achieves amazing results, from human intelligence grasping the secrets of the invisible electromagnetism and subatomic forces to a fly with the brain smaller than a poppy seed outwitting humans intent on swatting them. Natural selection uses mitochondria, DNA, sunlight, water and an unaccountable wealth of nutrients to accomplish an astounding range of behaviors and appropriate reactions to all sorts of stimuli. No doubt, then, natural selection has used awareness as a tool, maybe an essential and pervasive tool, for the survival of species or of the DNA, to follow Dawkins' identification of what exactly it is that survives selection.
So the answer to the question, "are AIs conscious" seems, forgive me, obvious. Of course they're not.
...because natural selection over hundreds of millions of years employed consciousness for the benefit of species survival while neural network engineers have no interest in integrating consciousness into its learning models even if they could (and they haven't a clue as to how to manipulate much less create consciouness in a network). The learning models don't need consciousness to learn -- they've got their training sets -- and the models themselves don't need survival skills since they don't replicate themselves or need to: humans design and implement them for them. Without any need for consciousness (learning by gradient descent, for example, requires no awareness), and no mechanism (replication), neural networks are about as likely to develop integrated central consciousness as the Empire State Building emerging out of the Triassic world of small dinosaurs.
It seems odd to me that people don't ask for the sources of things but rather jump to conclusions that either confirm their fears or their wishes. In the case of AI consciousness, it might be a bit of both. We're happy to believe that we have consciousness, but we're afraid the bots will have it and then we won't be able to control them (as if we control ourselves, or think we even should). This hastiness of imagination is common. It's the same wishful thinking as believing in the afterlife and in particular, heaven, as I described here. Our emotions are all derived from natural selection. If love and lust didn't grab us (emotions grab a hold of us, we don't pick and choose them -- we don't have emotions, they have us), we would long ago have gone extinct. So what do people imagine the afterlife would be after we've unsurvived? What's the point of any emotion when you're inhabiting a place populated by your relatives all weak and aged and on deaths door -- or do they all suddenly perk up and become 26 years old again? Or sweet sixteen? Or a wise and loved mom at 40? Which one, people?? Or is it just disembodied, emotionless "souls" in an ether of who-cares?
Forgive the digression. Back to AI and consciousness.
First, and most obviously, it's important to distinguish conscious-like behavior from actually having consciousness. If you are a behaviorist, then it doesn't matter whether AIs are actually aware, so you don't care if it isn't really conscious. If you are an ethicist worried about harming the feelings of others including AIs, then it doesn't matter whether AIs behave consciously. It only matters to you whether they really have, in their cloud space, feelings inside that can be hurt.
(It's worth noting that you can't be both an ethicist and a behaviorist unless you believe [as I do] that humans have a purpose in the universe regardless of human feelings or human well-being. A behaviorist treats humans as fleshy robots temporarily active, no more. I don't see any ethics emerging from such a view except maybe some kind of curious museum value: like protecting endangered species, not because they have feelings but because once they're gone, they can't come back and wouldn't that be a pity and a loss? However, if you believe as I do, that humans are alone among species that generate knowledge of the universe and of itself, and new knowledge can't be predicted -- at least not yet -- so we don't know where that knowledge will take us and along with it the universe, we have an obligation or a purpose to pursue that knowledge, regardless how much suffering it requires, though ceteris paribus, the less suffering the better. That knowledge -- just think about it -- might lead to some deep purpose of existence! So let's not be nihilists in our ignorance. The modern version of Pascal's wager is, put our bets on pursuing knowledge: can't hurt, and no one else can do it, so far as we know.)
I hear the objections already of the panpsychics. I'm one of them, so I feel well qualified to debunk the "everything has qualia, so AIs must have them too" argument. It's really quite simple. Suppose you're a panpsychist. Every particle or wave or whatever microstate has a feel. An electron accelerating in the Higgs field has a feeling. A wave's frequency and amplitude -- they too have a feel in themselves. We even call them "excitations".
To the panpsychist, AIs have many qualia: every chip has a feel, every connection. (Not the learning, btw, that's abstract, like math. In fact it is math -- the weights are expressed as numbers, the vectors and directions. These are all mathematical entities, ideas, not physical things.) But these many feels of the physical machinery, these qualia of the parts, are not developed or coordinated into a central consciousness. So you could say that any neural network has many consciousnesses, but the AI, or the neural network as an integral whole, has none. The reason is that neural network engineers have not designed the network to integrate qualia into its operation. Qualia play no role in neural network function and success. Again, natural selection took its long game time to coordinate the qualia generation by generation. AI engineers can't even find the qualia in AIs or anything or anywhere else. So what are we talking?
Did natural selection know what it was doing with qualia? That's the magical beauty of natural selection. It never knows anything and doesn't need to know. It doesn't know that x mutation will benefit its possessor. The selection -- the unsurviving -- does all the work. And that's another reason why the engineers will not likely marshal qualia into bots. Developing consciousness is not a mere information task, it's a hardware issue. Imitating conscious behavior: easy, especially for a bot. Develop an integral consciousness? No one even knows where to begin.
Now, as I mentioned here, engineers actually don't need to know and usually don't know all the details of their creations. The bicycle designer didn't know that to turn the vehicle the rider has to lean to one side. The engineer thought turning the front wheel would do all that. Turns out the engineer was wrong, but the thing works anyway, because people naturally contributed the leaning.
Now, that's not true of organic beings. Natural selection spent hundreds of millions of years developing and integrating qualia into the functionality of each surviving being, and that survival depended in part on the integration of qualia. That's why we like some foods and not others, why sex is so compelling and not an obligation, why ... well pick up Pinker's How the Mind Works for 600 pages of why we have these qualia inclinations. Neural networks are coordinated, an AI agent can call itself and recognize its own behaviors, but selfhood -- the ability to identify oneself distinct from others -- is not consciousness. A thermometer labelled "I'm calculating the temperature" has selfhood, as long as it says this only about itself.
Suppose you're not a panpsychist, but you do believe that somehow learning about the world entails consciousness. But if a neural network learns simply by mechanical means of gradient descent, it can surely do this purely mechanically, so where does the qualia suddenly arise? What for? It is designed to "learn" -- that is, give weights, vectors and directions in a multidimensional vector space -- and that's all. This notion that complexity will magically transform in the fog of incomprehensible integrations into qualia is just hand-waving, mistaking complexity and incomprehensibility for an excuse to pretend that emergent properties can be anything we want. Or it's mistaking complexity for consciousness -- that we don't really have qualia, it's just that our computations in our brain are so complex that the impenetrable fog of incomprehensible multiplicity of parts and relations gives the impression that we're experiencing sweetness or saltiness or whatever feeling. That's like intelligent design or the god of the gaps -- it's too complicated to understand therefore the complexity is the answer itself. That's a no-answer answer.
Will AI engineers ever master the sources of qualia and integrate them into robots? It's hard to imagine why anyone would want to do this outside of a limited experiment. But, the future is unknowable, so in the future there may be some good reason to create bots with awareness. It'll give new meaning to ethics and morality, beyond what we can imagine. But such is the future.
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