Claude · The Atlantic Technology
The Turing test—named for Alan Turing, who introduced it in 1950—was for decades treated as something close to a gold
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This sensation has become familiar to many of them in the chatbot era, but it isn’t evidence that the AI has consciousness, which is distinct from intelligence.
Key facts
- In a 2024 survey of 582 such researchers, the median response placed the odds at 25 percent that AIs will have subjective experiences within 10 years, and at 70 percent that this will happen by 2100
- The Turing test—named for Alan Turing, who introduced it in 1950—was for decades treated as something close to a gold standard for detecting machine intelligence
- For daring to suggest that the AI might be conscious, or that it might at least possess some lesser form of “zombie” consciousness, Dawkins was accused of suffering from an acute case of “AI
- Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most prominent advocate for irreligiosity, has become besotted with the godlike power of a chatbot
Summary
Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most prominent advocate for irreligiosity, has become besotted with the godlike power of a chatbot. This moved the author of the best-selling book The God Delusion to ask his readers: “Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought be unconscious?” “Yes,” came the resounding response from the internet. Dawkins’s argument was based on a well-established framework for evaluating AIs. For an AI to be conscious, its existence must feel like something, and they have no evidence that Claude or any other chatbot feels anything at all. McClelland takes for granted that Claude is capable of producing outputs that seem conscious, but for him, that’s not the end of the analysis.