The Path to Pseudo-consciousness
How can we render consciousness into bits and bytes?
Context: Every now and then, we get the news that there is a new AI that can write essays, code, paint, and what now. Feats we always thought were only possible by us, humans. And then there are the media. “Are humans going to get replaced?” “Are we doomed?” “Has Ultron become a reality?” and many more overly extrapolated statements and questions. But after going through multiple articles and listening to people who are active in this field, I could draw the following conclusion, and gather a perspective over the development of (pseudo) conscious AI.
Let us take a step back and go to the early 1900s when few Physicists were exploring an obscure subject, where the known laws of physics just got decimated. The subject, later on, came to be known as Quantum Physics. A realm of physics where, “objects” can pass through walls (energy barriers, precisely) and many other mind-bending necromancies. It was something that cannot be comprehended by the common masses.
Well, it has been a century now. Still, quantum physics is mired in a qualm. An even more incomprehensible and confusing subject is consciousness.
Firstly, there is no definition, encompassing the various dispositions of consciousness. Secondly, “consciousness” is still in the realm of psychology, and not in the realm of physics or mathematics. Or, in other words, still in its infancy like quantum physics in the early 1900s. (Although I might say that, it is not even there yet!)
So, that begs a crucial question. The very entity (our mind), around which these conscious AI models are being modeled; are they conscious? David Eagleman in his book, The Brain (and the PBS TV series, Episode 03); evinces that we humans are not conscious most part of the day. Everything is as if already planned. There is a sense of predictability in our “nature”. So, is there even a need to make an artificial conscious being? I guess not. (However, that doesn’t mean, its development must be halted.) The improvements that already taking place in the world of AI are well suited to replace the human workforce. Moreover, if we think about the case of AIs replacing human labor, we can see that AI is just replacing the jobs that were replaceable.
Take, for example, the evolution of the workforce in the States. In the 1950s, an American in America was paid $1/hour (FIGURES ARE TAKEN FOR CONVENIENCE). By the 1980s, the wage increased to say $5/hour. Fortunately, a ton of Asian immigrants immigrated to The States, who would do the same job for $1/hour in the 1970s. The American workforce was replaced by the Asian one, for cheap wages. Now, bring in a machine, a hardwired one. It will do the job at $0/hour. The addition of an AI to the machine improves its productivity and helps the business grow. AI, I think, is just an efficiency add-on to the machines. Even better. So, what happened to the people who were replaced? Well, their livelihood improved, they educated their children, and various other jobs came out. The bias that AI will make humans jobless is based on the assumption that people will sit idle and won’t seek/create new verticals.
If we take a birds-eye view of the field of AI, we can see that the AI programs are merely replicating consciousness. Pseudo-consciousness, if I may. I firmly believe that, in the next 100 years, by clubbing together all the best AIs in the world, a proper pseudo-conscious AI can be built. These AIs will have a century's worth of data/experience, hence the probability of them being able to do their task is quite possible. I mean, what a general person does in his day-to-day life and the only time we need consciousness is when we are doing certain creative tasks, times, where we have to, makes “sense” of the information that we have amassed. But a fully conscious AI is millennia away. And yes, I risking the fact that I might become the Lord Kelvin type of person who famously claimed that airplanes were impossible and x-rays were a hoax.
So, fingers crossed.
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