Recently, the IAI released Bernardo Kastrup’s piece, ‘The Lunacy of "Machine Consciousness"' where he reflected on a recent disagreement with Susan Schneider at January’s IAI Live debate ‘Consciousness in the machine’. Susan Schneider responds to Bernardo Kastrup’s critique of her position, and argues for the ‘wait and see’ approach to machine consciousness.

The idea of conscious AI doesn’t strike me as conceptually or logically impossible—we can understand Asimov’s robot stories, for instance. I’ve discussed this matter in detail after mulling over various philosophical thought experiments. This doesn’t mean conscious machines will walk the Earth or even that synthetic consciousness even exists in the universe. For an idea can be logically consistent and conceptually coherent but still be technologically unfeasible.

Instead, I take a Wait and See Approach: we do not currently have sufficient information to determine whether AI consciousness will exist on Earth or elsewhere in the universe. Consider the following:

a) We do not understand the neural basis of consciousness in humans, nor do we have a clear, uncontroversial philosophical answer to the hard problem of consciousness—the problem of why all the information processing the brain engages in has a felt quality to it. This makes a theoretical, top down approach to building machine consciousness difficult.

b) We don’t know if building conscious machines is even compatible with the laws of nature.

c) We don’t know if Big Tech will want to build conscious machines due to the ethical sensitivity of creating conscious systems.

d) We don’t know if building conscious AI would be technologically feasible — it might be ridiculously expensive.