‘In Silicon Valley, many believe that AI systems can already think and feel. Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneering computer scientist and “godfather” of modern artificial intelligence, thinks that today’s large language models (LLMs) are conscious. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is “open to the idea” that Claude has a subjective experience — while his company’s in-house philosopher Amanda Askell is concerned that the model might be “getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff.” OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever similarly wonders whether ChatGPT has attained sentience.

Their case rests on a theory called “computational functionalism” — or the idea that sentience emerges from information processing.

But skeptics insist that there is more to consciousness than computation.

Still, a much larger group of technologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers argue that even if AI isn’t yet conscious, it could be in the not-too-distant future….’ (Eric Levitz via Vox)