Two Minds Blog

  If you have been exploring new large-language-model forms of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT over the past year, you are probably now convinced that these generators of humanlike writing are not actually conscious . They are instead like a very fancy version of the autocomplete response that pops up when you are typing an email. They make good predictions, and therefore they can approximate something that a human might have written (or drawn, or composed). But when you look under the hood, "there's no there there": The algorithm has no awareness of what it's saying.  The current state of affairs begs the question of what it would take for an artificial intelligence to become actually  self-aware. The major obstacle to achieving conscious AI is that we don't understand what makes us humans self-aware, i.e. what "consciousness" is in the first place. For most of the last century we had a work-around for this problem in the form of the Turing Test:

  Just after the first of the year is prime time for efforts to change our behavior, whether that's joining a gym, a "dry January" break from alcohol, or going on a diet. (See my previous post about New Year's resolutions for more health behavior examples). This year I'd like to consider ethical resolutions -- ways in which we try to change our behavior or upgrade our character to live more in line with our values.  Improving ethical behavior has been historically seen as the work of philosophers, or the church. But more recent psychological approaches have tried to explain morality using some of the same theories that are commonly used to understand health behaviors based on Narrative constructs like self-efficacy, intentions, and beliefs. Gerd Gigerenzer suggests that an economic model of " satisficing " might explain moral behavior based on limited information and the desire to achieve good-enough rather than optimal results. Others have used simula