So I can ask, while I'm talking to you right now, is Chris a philosophical zombie? I mean, you're behaving intelligently. You've got a lot of interesting things to say. So I'm inclined to describe you consciousness, but I can't prove that any other person is conscious. It's a interesting hypothesis that, you know, some philosophers of the view solipsism says, I'm the only conscious person in the universe. Now, you don't want to

go down there because it leads to megalomania and mental illness and so on. I think there are some

prominent political leaders who I think may subscribe to this view. Yeah, the solopsistic worldview may be

present more widely than you'd think. But the question of explaining why it is, in fact,

that we are conscious and not philosophical zombies is one that is very difficult to answer. Now

we're actually being confronted by that question quite concretely in the case of AI,

where we have beings which are behaving in very sophisticated ways, but are they conscious?

Hello, and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

I'm very excited today for another edition of our special series where we take a look at all the implications, both terrifying and exhilarating of artificial intelligence,

it's philosophical implications, it's social, economic, and political implications.

You know, we've been using this term called the Turing test, and that refers to the brilliant,

one of the great minds of the last century, Alan Turing, British philosopher, computational

scientist, who basically came up with

this idea of, well, how would you know a machine is intelligent? And the Turing test was you

would know it's intelligent if you can talk to the machine and not know it's a machine.

It would convincingly impersonate a person to the point that you couldn't distinguish.

Now, what's crazy is for a long time, this was kind of the bar.

Can you make a machine that under interrogation essentially, a set of repeated interactions,

you had no idea it was a machine? I think fair to say that we have passed that bar. In fact,

I don't know if you've had this experience. I've had an experience of like talking to customer

service chatbots and genuinely not knowing if I was talking to AI or person. In fact, even having like somewhat humiliating experience

of being like, are you a real person? So that part of the turning test is getting past right now.

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