Hey everyone. It's Aisa. Welcome to your undivided attention. When we go out and talk to people about the AI dilemma and the risks we're going to see from AI, there's one question we always very predictably get asked.

And that is, will AI become conscious? Will AI wake up and then kill us all?

We're not alone in fielding these kinds of questions.

People who think about AI for a living get questions about machine consciousness all the time and it takes up an outside space in the

public discourse. This question of AI becoming conscious exploded into the news the summer of

2022 when a Google engineer named Blake Lamoyne publicly claimed that Google's

large language model was sentient.

Google has a policy against creating sentient AI. was sentient

and AI. And in fact when I informed them that I think they had created

sentient AI visit, no that's not possible. We have a policy against that.

L'Moyne stuck to his claims and was ultimately fired from Google. Most experts agreed he was wrong.

In my opinion though, is AI conscious? That's the wrong question to ask. After all, AI doesn't have to wake up to cause massive damage. AI doesn't need to be conscious to overwhelm our democracies or build a bio-wepin.

Instead, the right question is, will AI persuade people that it is conscious?

And will people then form relationships so strong with

AI that they're willing to make dangerous sacrifices for them.

In the years since more prominent figures in AI have argued that AI actually is on the path to consciousness though

And companies like open AI have taken great efforts to make their chatbots feel like a conscious sentient human.

In the end, perhaps the question of,

is AI conscious, is so endlessly fascinating

because of our own self-obsession.

Each one of us has that spark of awareness,

and fundamentally we want to know,

...