THIS MAY be the most consequential moment in the history of intelligence. In only a few years, artificial intelligence has come to rival human performance across domains once thought distinctively ours: language, reasoning, creativity and persuasion. Increasingly, people are asking whether these systems are conscious—whether it actually feels like something to be an AI.
The second trap is distraction. the biological pedigree is undeniable, and who is to say that the systems could not eventually be assembled into an integrated, conscious whole While a single system of this kind is far simpler than even a mouse brain. Then there is neuromorphic AI: systems designed to mimic brain processes far more closely than conventional AI systems do, and which are already used in sophisticated supercomputers.
Consider biological AIs, such as the brain-in-a-dish technology that Cortical Labs is deploying in data centres: living human neurons, grown from stem cells on a silicon chip that stimulates them and reads their activity back, so that the culture learns from feedback.
Fixating on chatbots diverts us from more pressing “grey-zone” cases.
