Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, and is there any idea more dangerous than giving consciousness, breathing life and will into inanimate machines?

The rise of artificial intelligence is something that is preoccupying the world's most brilliant minds and seems to be cleaving

us into one of at least two camps, one of which says we are basically opening a portal

and giving birth to a new life that is going to be much more sophisticated than we are,

at least in terms of its computational capacity,

and we just don't know what that is going to mean. We don't know how to control something

that is so much smarter than us that it is doing a lifetime worth of human thinking in one

second. It has the predictive power and ability to see beyond horizons

that we can't even possibly fathom

about the links between challenges that we face,

opportunities that might present themselves.

And all of this can sound terribly sci-fi

until you actually interact with GPT4 or some of these other chatbots.

And they behave in ways that seem like there's something going on inside them.

That doesn't mean that they're having an experience yet.

But we don't even understand what it means for us to have an experience

or why we have experiences or why it's like anything to be you

in a way that it is not like something to be your calculator or your phone.

And we are creating systems now that are so complicated and so frankly intelligent

and nimble that a lot of scientists are worried that there's some small chance,

it doesn't have to be a very high chance, for it to nonetheless be worth

taking seriously, some small chance that the alignment problem could become real, meaning

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