You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

We see consciousness in AI the same way we see faces in clouds, says neuroscientist and Neil Seth,

an all-too-human tendency to project inner life onto machines.

Just because consciousness and intelligence go together in us

does not mean that they go together in general.

The assumption that they do, well, that's a reflection of our own psychology,

not an insight into the nature of reality.

We are built to be seduced, like narcissists, by our own reflections.

And so we see ourselves in our algorithms.

In this talk, Seth makes a careful case against conscious AI

and explains why mistaking a sophisticated mirror for a mind

could reshape ethics, power, and what it means to be human in

ways we are not prepared for.

The AI we have is already smart, at least in some ways, but could it ever be conscious?

Will a robot ever gaze at a sunset and experience the beautiful colors, the reds and the oranges?

Will it feel a sense of beauty

or a rush of joy? That's coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk of the day.

So for centuries, people have fantasized about playing God

by creating artificial versions of ourselves.

From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Howe in Stanley Kubrick's 2001

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