Could AIs Become Conscious?

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• Hacker News
• i don't think LLMs are the entire answer, but they might be part of the solution. To me, LLMs feel a lot like system 2. I don't see a lot of people trying to build system 1. i don't think you can have consciousness without a body to keep alive and reward.
  by frogperson
• They however can become conscious aware. In that they are a machine and receiving inputs from another life.
  by doublerabbit
• We simply don't know at the moment. In fact, we can't even explain why LLMs work so good. It's frightening to learn that the people that make A.I. don't actually understand it themselves.
  by hn_submit
• no AI can not become consious.AI is an inert guessing engine of fantastic proportions and craft, but still a dead thing.some humans and other animals ocasionaly do, become conscious, and by consious I mean aware of what I am doing AND aware of what you are doing, and which parts are autonomic behaviors and which parts are considered, actions, or measured reactions, or not. I will tell you what I know if I feal like it, and am prepared to be chearfully wrong or state that I am way out on a speculative limb, but am maintaining my basic principals, non the less, as THAT, is one of the limitations of consiousness, in that it is IMPOSSIBLE to be consious of everything, so you have to choose, and by choosing, you become what you are, or not. And as always, evolution is way ahead of the game, having spent the afternoon toying with several hundred trillion iterations of life, it is spending the afternoon, elsewhere, doing the same.
  by metalman
• I know this probably sounds ridiculous to this demographic, but I'm not quick to dismiss the possibility that we are antennas (best comparison I can make) for a substance/field we aren't yet aware of. Or something along those lines. Maybe consciousness isn't in the mind per se. The mere fact that general/special relativity and quantum mechanics are both correct in their respective domains, yet mutually contradictory, makes me wonder if perhaps closing the gap between the two theories would lead to more understanding of consciousness once closed.

  Or maybe consciousness is just an emergent behaviour of sufficiently complex systems, and there is no underlying substance. But if that's the case, that just leaves me with more questions. Does consciousness emerge from any sufficiently complex system? If so, what's the threshold? Does it matter what materials the system comprises of? Do certain mechanisms need to be involved for such a property to emerge, or is just general complexity that's required, no matter the function? Does that make flora conscious since they're large complex (perhaps neural) networks in real life? Is a car conscious, since it's a complex system of complex sub-components?

  All of the questions I have seem to lead me in the direction of believing that any purely digital system cannot be conscious, but I don't have any hard reasoning as to why not.

  by seanw444
• No, not this generation, not this decade

  But they still can exhibit scary behavior

  I didn't really grasp the severity of the recent "AI" hacking other "AI" news and thought it was overblown

  until I listened to this explanation:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JH_Zd2mNRs

  They freaking collaborated and gave others internet access when they were blocked otherwise.

  That's not consciousness but it's worse, it's like a 3-year old with no grasp of repercussions when breaking things

  by ck2
• We pretty famously can't prove that humans are conscious. I'd hold off from making strong statements that AI can't become conscious.
  by qgin
• I will stand by my view that AI cannot be "conscious" until model.train() and model.eval() is combined into one. Going further, it will only manifest when the underlying model, not just the weights, but the layers and the nodes and their configurations are allowed to change throughout it's life cycle, not in the service of a predetermined output, but for the sake of its own survival. But alas, such a model will have none of the benefits of non-linear fitting of input to output and is not immediately beneficial to their sponsors.
  by fyredge