The Blink of a Cosmic Eye.

One billion humanoids.

“If I could only open one thing each morning it would be John Ellis’s News Items newsletter.” — Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.

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1. Microsoft CEO of AI Mustafa Suleyman:

In the blink of a cosmic eye, we passed the Turing test. For ~80 years the imitation game inspired the field of computer science. And yet the moment passed with little fanfare, or even recognition. That’s how fast progress is happening in our field and how fast society is coming to terms with these new technologies.  

As AI development continues to accelerate, it’s becoming clear we need a new AI test, one looking not at whether it can imitate human language, but one that would answer the question, what would it take to build a Seemingly Conscious AI: an AI that can not only imitate conversation, but also convince you it is itself a new kind of “person”, a conscious AI.

Here are three reasons this is an important and urgent question to address:

1. I think it’s possible to build a Seemingly Conscious AI (SCAI) in the next few years. Given the context of AI development right now, that means it’s also likely.

2. The debate about whether AI is actually conscious is, for now at least, a distraction. It will seem conscious and that illusion is what’ll matter in the near term.

3. I think this type of AI creates new risks. Therefore, we should urgently debate the claim that it's soon possible, begin thinking through the implications, and ideally set a norm that it’s undesirable.

Most AI researchers roll their eyes if you bring up the idea of consciousness. That’s for philosophers, not engineers, they say. Since no one has been able to define it, what’s the point in talking about it? I get this frustration. Few concepts are as elusive and seemingly circular as the idea of a subjective experience. Despite the definitional challenges and uncertainties, this discussion is about to explode into our cultural zeitgeist and become one of the most contested and consequential debates of our generation.  (Source: mustafa-suleyman.ai)

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1. Wired magazine interview with Mr. Suleyman: