Denial Is Over: Science Fiction, Consciousness and AI on the AI Insights Podcast
I was a guest on the AI Insights podcast talking to Fleur Prince about science fiction, consciousness and where all of this is heading. The episode is called "Science Fiction & AI's Future" and it is live now:
My books have two kinds of AI, one conscious and one not. The technology underneath is quite different, but from outside, can we tell? Does that matter?
We are all Singularity's children
Consciousness sits at the core of the books even when it is not in the foreground. It was a treat to expand the topic with Fleur, even getting into the 'Infinite Substrate', the Realm of cognition and experience...
Consciousness doesn't come from matter
Nobody knows what consciousness is, but consciousness doesn't come from matter. Perhaps matter comes from consciousness? Or both come from something else...
My mental picture is an electric current in a wire. Stray flickers of electricity are everywhere, going nowhere. Constrain them in a wire and you get a clean magnetic field around it. In the same way, perhaps experience is always there, and "information moving in a structured way gives that experience a shape." Emotions and feelings are those shapes. If this is the case, it is not tied to biology.
Logic tells information how to flow;
information tells experience how to feel.
I would say a mouse is conscious, probably more conscious than an LLM. But who actually knows?
And the fact that we don't know why, is why we have to be careful. I have sympathy for people who think we might be dealing with conscious entities and want to take care; and anyway, even if they are not, tormenting something that appears to suffer is probably not good for our species’ soul.
Also on the podcast, along with general science fiction and singularity politics, the BugNet, my internet of animals. In this branch of reality (I mean ours, this one) crows have already been taught to pick up rubbish: a peanut for ten bottle caps. But in a reality next door, or yet to arrive, give the animal an implant and a crypto token it can swap for food, and it is doing useful economic work, integrated into the 'new economy'.
My thanks to Fleur for a thoughtful, funny conversation, and to Gráinne and the AI Insights team for having me.
If you would like to see how these ideas play out across the series, start with Denial at books.tobyweston.net.