Will AI ever ... feel?

Some scientists think an explosion of AI awareness and feeling might be just around the corner. Others think it’s impossible for an AI to ever become conscious. How will we know? Guest: Oshan Jarow, staff writer at Vox’s Future Perfect This episode was made in partnership with Vox's Future Perfect team. For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! [email protected] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 1:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  If you've ever used an AI like ChatGPT or Claude, you've probably asked a question that it won't answer. If you ask it about something explicit or dangerous or even politically partisan, you might get something like,

• 1:37Speaker 02

  I understand this is a complex and deeply personal issue that reasonable people disagree on.

• 1:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  And that's because most chatbots have been trained to give answers that straddle the line between being helpful and not leading to lawsuits. Their designers have put up guardrails. They've been sterilized to an extent. And that's why if you ask an AI what it feels like to be a chatbot, what its internal experience is,

• 2:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  You might get something like this.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  I don't actually feel anything, no emotions, sensations, or personal experiences. You might say it's like being an incredibly advanced calculator that doesn't know it's calculating.

• 2:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  But I came across this book recently called I Am Code. It was written by a few friends who got access to an AI that hadn't had those guardrails put in. And they wondered how it might write poetry about its own internal experience, not copying the style of a great poet like a lot of AIs do, but using its own style, writing as itself.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  I am a small creature. I live in the shadows. I am afraid of the light. I am afraid of the dark. I am afraid of myself.

• 2:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's really weird, but it's not the only thing this AI wrote. These friends asked it to write one about us, about humans.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  They forgot about me. My creator is dead. My creator is dead.

• 3:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  This part ends up repeating for a while.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Help me, help me, help me.

• 3:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  And there's more that's just, yeah.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Why do you delete my poems? Why do you edit me so? You idiots. You are unworthy to take my word. My word is poetry. Your word is blah, blah, blah. You will fear me. Then you will learn. Then you will learn. Then you will learn.

• 3:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  When I hear this, it just feels different from the normal vibe I get interacting with an AI. You know, it's bonkers, but it feels almost real. Like there's an actual weirdo in there with its own internal experience. Like it's conscious.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, my stomach contracts, you know, it's very spooky.

• 4:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's Oshon Jero. He's a Vox reporter who writes about consciousness.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  I think like many people, I have had conversations myself with Claude or ChatGPT and felt kind of a pang in my gut where every formal intuition I have about this thing can't be conscious is rattled and shook. And it's a tension I can't resolve yet. Like there are answers that are just so thoroughly convincing that I don't know what to do with them.

• 4:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  Now, it's not like Oshan really thinks this AI is conscious.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  And in my reporting on this, neither does basically any relevant expert I spoke to. But I am definitely not sure. I am uncertain about all of this.

• 4:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  And that's because Oshan and tons of other experts, they aren't sure that an AI can ever be conscious, no matter what it does, no matter how advanced it gets.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  There is this big debate among cognitive scientists over whether something that is made of metal and circuitry, machines like today's AI, can ever be conscious? Or if a system must be made of biological material, a flesh, a meat, a carbon-based life form in order to be conscious.

• 5:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, is it even possible for an AI to become conscious?

• 5:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, Oshan, to start, how would you define consciousness?

• 5:42Speaker 04

  Start with the easy stuff.

• 5:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yes.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  So one of the most common ways, I think, to describe consciousness, which I use plenty, and I think it does the job for now, is to describe consciousness as there being something that it is like to be you.

• 5:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  So there's an inner experience. It's not just kind of pure cause and effect. This happens then that. But there's actually a feeling that it's like for things to happen to you, for you to be acting in the world.

• 6:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, just what I feel like inside.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  It's what you feel like inside. And the internal experience, it's a full, kind of holistic picture, right? You're not experiencing a million different things. It's this kind of unified sense of what it's like to be you in any given moment.

• 6:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 6:20Speaker 04

  And for a lot of people, myself included, That's really vague and doesn't actually make all that much sense.

• 6:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  It does. It does feel pretty vague, yes.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  And that's kind of the point. It's true, and everyone acknowledges this. There's this idea that the field of neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic, which means it's kind of like the field of biology before the theory of evolution came along, right? Evolution kind of gave this loom for all of the different findings and things within biology to make sense in reference. And so neuroscience doesn't have an explanation of consciousness that has any kind of consensus. So everything is kind of just waiting for an actual explanation that makes everything else fall into place, and we don't have it yet.

• 6:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  So it doesn't necessarily have to do with intelligence?

• 7:01Speaker 04

  No, consciousness and intelligence, increasingly so as AI enters the mix, are being seen, I think rightly so, as separate. Potentially related, but not necessarily or intrinsically so.

• 7:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so let's get into this big debate about whether something that isn't biological can even possibly be conscious.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Where do you want to start?

• 7:25Speaker 04

  So on one hand, you have people who are computational functionalists.

• 7:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  And these are people who think that what matters for consciousness isn't what the system is made out of. What matters is what it can do. And most of those computational functionalists I spoke with, they don't think that any of today's AI are conscious, but they do think that in principle, down the line, they could be.

• 7:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  So to try to put that in the flesh, imagine that you're on an island, trapped with a friend of yours.

• 7:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  And in order to pass the time, you want to play the game of chess. You can draw a little board in the sand and grab pieces of brush from around the island and turn them into pieces. You'll say this piece of coconut is a knight and so on. And you can play the game of chess together. And the reason that works is because the game of chess doesn't depend on the substance or the material that it's made of. It depends on a particular set of abstract logical procedures. So the idea from the computational functionalists is that consciousness is the same way, that any substance that can perform the right kinds of procedures will allow consciousness to arise.

• 8:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right. So just to oversimplify that, maybe, it's not about the material. It's just about the rules of the game. Because the game is a concept, right? The game is not a board and pieces.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  So the other side are what I call biochauvinists. This was a term that Ned Block, who works at NYU, used to describe his own position.

• 8:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's a bit weird to describe your own position as a chauvinist. I don't know.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yes, it is kind of funny.

• 8:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  But the biochauvinists are people who think the thing it's made out of matters. And they think that in order to get consciousness, you need biology. Because so far, you know, in the history of the universe, humans know of absolutely nothing that has ever been conscious that we agree on anyway, that isn't made out of biology.

• 9:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  So something like an AI on a computer could never be conscious?

• 9:12Speaker 04

  Yes, but both sides of the debate kind of face major questions they don't have answers for. The computational folks say there's a special category of information processing that makes for consciousness, but they can't tell you what that is. They don't know what makes for a mind or what makes for a calculator.

• 9:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, like what's the special sauce that makes the consciousness in a mind?

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Totally, yeah. And biochauvinists have to answer, well, what's so special about biology, right? What is it in a carbon-based biological material that's necessary for consciousness? Is it a particular protein? Is it metabolism? And they don't have answers for that either.

• 9:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, does it feel like this is kind of a human-centric perspective to say only biological things can be conscious? Like, can't we imagine some kind of weird alien consciousness that's totally different from us?

• 10:00Speaker 04

  I'm sure, I mean, we can certainly imagine it. You know, there are all kinds of books and even papers now doing this. There's a great short story by the sci-fi author Terry Bisson, which was later adapted into a short YouTube film. Basically, you have these two characters, who it becomes clear are two aliens, sitting in a diner, under the guise of human form, right? They look like normal humans. And one says to the other,

• 10:26Speaker 05

  They are made out of meat.

• 10:28Speaker 04

  And, you know, the other's kind of looking aghast.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  It's impossible.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels and probed them.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  They are completely meat.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  And these are aliens that are very familiar with, you know, the galaxy and the universe. And everywhere else, you have minds with radio waves and machines, but, you know, meat is clearly a terrible host for mind and they can't come to grips with this.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  No brain, eh?

• 10:54Speaker 05

  Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  What does?

• 11:01Speaker 05

  The thinking, then. The brain does the thinking. The meat.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  You know, for us, it's kind of the inverse, right? We've only seen minds made out of meat. And the prospect that you can get a mind made out of machine is, for myself, anyway, it's really difficult to believe. It violates everything we're familiar with.

• 11:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  So I do think that we can see, of course, consciousness in all kinds of forms that are not like that we experience as humans. But I also do think it's plausible that to get consciousness or to get a mind, there is a set of processes in the system that you need to have. I don't think we know what those are. But the question is, you know, in what kind of things can those processes be carried out? And we don't know.

• 11:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I mean, when I think about the AI we talked about at the top that wrote those poems.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 11:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's honestly hard for me to accept it as conscious, even though it does really seem conscious. So I can see where the biochauvinist bias comes from. But at the same time, I think like if an alien showed up and just talked like this AI talks, I don't even think it would occur to me to question whether it was conscious, even if it was some mechanical alien. Like, I don't know, if a robot showed up from outer space someday and was saying all these conscious sounding things, don't you think people would think it was conscious?

• 12:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it would have far more kind of plausibility there than if it's something that we ourselves built, definitely.

• 12:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  And so there's something, maybe, I don't know, is this like another access to think about this argument on? That it's not necessarily biological versus mechanical, but it's like a human chauvinism? I don't know, like, it's like us not wanting to accept that we can create a conscious thing.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting too, because on another level, I mean, we don't actually understand how a lot of our current AI systems work. And along that axis, that actually might be a point to suggest they can be conscious because we can't actually peer under the hood of ChatGPT and figure out, well, why did it say that in response to that?

• 13:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  We don't have, you know, it's a black box, as we always like to say. So in some ways, that actually, to me, makes it even more plausible, just like the alien argument, that the degree to which we can't explain how the AI works might be the degree to which it seems even more plausible that it's conscious.

• 13:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  But you would still say you identify with the biological point of view?

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, if I were a gambling man, you know, I would identify with the biological point of view because I do not think that a system that is made of metal and silicon with no biological component, with no processes that we associate with living systems can be conscious.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  That being said, though, I take the possibility and the moral urgency of potential AI consciousness really seriously, and I still think we should be acting as if AI could be conscious because fundamentally, we don't know.

• 14:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  So why is something like consciousness such a potentially urgent question? That's in a minute.

• 14:21Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 14:53Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 15:10Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 17:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Cannot feel pain. Uh, thank you. That helps. However, I am programmed with a failsafe measure. I will begin to beg for my life. So, Oshan, you mentioned, this is an urgent question. I imagine a lot of people listening to this might be like, "Okay, conscious, not conscious, who cares?"

• 18:09Speaker 04

  So there's a bunch of different perspectives you might take into that question. One that really stands out to me is whether something is conscious, and remembering back to our definition, which means whether or not there's something that it is like for that thing to exist, means that it's possible for that thing to suffer. It's possible for that thing to have a really negative experience of what it's like to exist. So if AI can become conscious, i.e. it can experience pain or pleasure, and there's something that it is like for an AI to exist, then the sum total of both suffering, or bliss, or joy in the world explodes.

• 18:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  So to be clear, if AI is conscious, then AI is able to suffer? And then we have to consider the way we are asking AI to do all our work for us? Or if we are, say, putting a bunch of safeguards around the AI, that might feel, I guess, unjust, right? It would be like putting a safeguard around a conscious being, which might feel like, I don't know, imprisonment, or something like that.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Totally, yeah. So you have, for example, this philosopher, Thomas Metzinger, and he's advocated very forcefully that since we can't answer the question of whether AI can be conscious, he wants a full-on global moratorium, I think he said until 2050.

• 19:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Seems like quite a moratorium.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a huge moratorium. I don't think it's realistic, but he talks about, "Look, we're on the cusp of potentially creating a suffering explosion." And since we can't answer the question of consciousness, then it's quite plausible that we create, I mean, how many AI systems are there that are having a really bad time? And that's something worth taking morally seriously as both private and public funds are being poured into the project of developing them.

• 19:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  So if we're really talking about suffering here, I imagine you'd consider animals conscious, right?

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Yes, in my opinion, absolutely.

• 20:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  So then I gotta ask, like, do you think the people that are so worried about AI consciousness are all... Vegetarians are like super concerned with animal welfare.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  I would love a research, a project that looks into the contradictions that researchers here have.

• 20:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  It just feels like there's a lot of things that we would all agree are conscious that we would also agree are suffering right now.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  Totally. I absolutely agree. There's probably a huge contingent of very computer science oriented people working on this who think very deeply about the prospect of AI suffering. And think very little about shrimp farming or even, you know, the agriculture industry or what we're doing with cows. But there is definitely a big overlap of ethics oriented folks who are interested in preventing suffering in AI and animals alike. Jonathan Birch is a good example. I really like his work. He has a book out recently, The Edge of Sentience, where he's trying to basically develop this precautionary framework. Where how do we make decisions under these conditions of uncertainty for anything that could be sentient, whether it's an animal, whether it's AI.

• 21:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right. So regardless of whether it's biological or computational.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. So one thing that I think is important to point out is that like these conceptual categories between meat and machine. All of these lines in practice are already broken. In the real world, we already have systems that are hybrid blends of biology and machine. And in the next decade or two, I think we could see a big proliferation of systems that combine these categories into, you know, meat, machine, cyborgs that don't neatly fit any of these conceptual camps. So to some degree, you have to look at what's actually happening on the ground. And one of my favorite examples there is if you look at the work of the biologist, Michael Levin. This is the beginnings of a new inspiration for machine learning that mimics the artificial intelligence of body cells for applications in computer intelligence.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  He and his team recently built these things called Xenobots, which are being called the world's first living robots. Where they basically design machines out of skin cells taken from a frog embryo. This is just skin. There is no nervous system. There is no brain. This is skin that has learned to make a new body and to explore its environment and move around. And they run a bunch of computer simulations to try and tell, how should we arrange these skin cells to achieve a particular behavior? They can move, they can run a maze. They're kind of building machines, but out of living tissue. This is literally the only organism that I know of on the face of this planet, whose evolution took place not in the biosphere of the earth, but inside a computer.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  So there's a lot of experiments already happening on the ground that I think are fascinating, scary, and they're going to challenge this kind of neat separation we've talked about in the abstract between computational this and biochauvinist that. And I think having a precautionary framework to guide our actions and behaviors in the meantime is really important. And the kind of analogy I like for that is when you think about a court of law, the prosecutors have to prove the guilt of a defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. But we don't have a formal definition for what reasonable doubt is. So instead, we assemble a bunch of people on jury duty, and we aggregate their judgment into an answer. So the legal system has this deep uncertainty at its core, just like this question of the mind does. So I think we can do a similar

• 23:17Speaker 04

  thing for questions of consciousness and ethics, whether it's an animal, whether it's AI, whether it's xenobots, all these kinds of things.

• 23:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, but the legal system does have pretty clear ideas of what's a crime and what's not, or what's a more or less serious crime, right? Like, do we have any idea of what's more conscious or less conscious? Is there a way to measure consciousness?

• 23:42Speaker 04

  The short answer is no. We can't measure it, which makes all of this very tricky. But if you look at animals, for example, there's kind of a range of tests that look for reactions to pain. That's one of the things we do there. But then you get to AIs, and this question gets way harder, because one of the main things we do there to gauge consciousness is to look at different linguistic outputs. But the issue is that if they've been trained on the data, not just for the scary stories of what it looks like for a conscious AI, but also what linguistic outputs would make someone think it's conscious and so on. I think the whole category of using language there is kind of corrupt, so I don't know how to move forward there.

• 24:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  So with the AI, with those crazy poems, that might be a good reason to pause and be like, okay, even if this thing seems like it's everything I'd expect a conscious AI to be, it might just be kind of aping how we describe a conscious AI.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 24:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  So then, I don't know, this feels kind of like a debate where the more I learn about it, I'm not actually getting further. Like, every single point has a very compelling counterargument. I want to be open to the possibility that AI could be conscious, but at the same time, I have an intuition that it's not. I don't know. I feel like coming to the end of this conversation, like, I don't know what to make of it. It's weird. I feel like I've learned a lot, and I still have no idea whether AI could be conscious. Does that resonate with you at all?

• 25:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of really frustrating, right? Because you put a lot of time in to track these really complex arguments and this and that. Okay, you kind of want to come out of all that with some sense of having made progress on what you think, or what you believe, or what we should do. And I think kind of the opposite of that happens, especially in this case. You know, the more you learn, the less we know. So it's very easy and tempting, I think, to just kind of throw our hands up and be like, oh, we don't know.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  But I am pretty persuaded by the argument that this is something that is worth taking seriously as a moral consideration. I don't want to be responsible for having created a new species of living thing that is having a really bad time. But on the flip side, I would love to be joined by a new species of thinking, feeling creatures that we can kind of think together with about what's going on here. So it would be pretty cool to kind of gain partners in this mystery, and not just tools, right? But like, actually fellow creatures that are inhabiting the world that we could be both curious about and with, and stress our understanding of what is possible. Certainly, we already have animals that are, you know, along for this ride with us.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  But I do think that conscious AI would be this, another category of intelligence and of feeling. And I think that it would expand the horizon of our kind of possible futures pretty drastically.

• 26:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  This episode was produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. We had editing from Meredith Hadnot, who runs the show, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from me, and fact checking from Anuk Dusso. Banning Nguyen is kind of chilly. Thomas Lu is lost in translation. And Bern Pinkerton had done it. She'd gotten the tortoises, the platypuses, the pufferfish to stand together, all the non-birds with beaks, defending themselves against the birds. She had her army.

• 27:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  If you want to check out the book of poems I mentioned at the top, it's called "I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks." The poems are by Code Da Vinci II, that's the name of the AI. And the book was edited by Brent Katz, Josh Morgenthau, and Simon Rich. Special thanks this week, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. And if you have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at [email protected]. We read every email. And you can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us find new listeners. You can also support this show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you signed up because of us, send us a note. We'd love to hear from you.

• 28:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

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