Q some of the conversations that this, this model was generating were, felt, felt very human-like to him. And so, now we go to the professor of neuroscience to talk a little bit about Um, what this might mean. So, I don't, what did you think when you, when you saw that story and, and what, what is your barometer for helping us figure out whether computers are sentient or not?
A Well, Lambda is impressive. I mean, I think Blaise is pointing to this. There's no point in gaslighting the progress that's been made in machine learning and AI. These, these are very, very impressive technologies that have great, uh, potential, great function. But there's this huge problem of conflating intelligence with, with consciousness. And so a lot of the debate that I hear is, I think, very sort of well finessed about how far along the road are we to true or general artificial intelligence, and we can discuss how far that is and how not. But that's a completely different thing from, from sentience or consciousness, and that's, I think, the focus of, of the debate today. Nobody really can give us a completely consensus definition of consciousness, but we all know what it is, and it feels like something to be a conscious system. You can feel pleasure, pain. There's experience going on, and my barometer is that we need to distinguish intelligence from consciousness. There's something about the human psychology. There's some sort of human exceptionalism going on here where we tend to associate intelligence with consciousness. And think that as systems increase in their level of intelligence at some point, usually the point at which we begin to approximate human level intelligence, the lights come on for that system and suddenly it is not only intelligent, it's also aware, b…
AI assessment note: “my barometer is that we need to distinguish intelligence from consciousness.”