Will AI become conscious? What a philosopher and a neuroscientist think

In March last year, the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, published the results of an experiment. It had asked almost 300 people to have a conversation with two mystery partners, one human and one AI, and try to determine which was which. Many couldn't. When chatting with OpenAI's ChatGPT GPT‐4.5, which had been asked to adopt a "human‐like persona", it was judged to be human 73 per cent of the time. Meta's Llama 3 was judged to be human 56 per cent of the time. For the first time, large language models had clearly passed the famous Turing Test, a thought experiment proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, to test just how smart these machines could become and whether they could ever think, like us.

Will AI become conscious? What a philosopher and a neuroscientist think. In March last year, the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, published the results of an experiment. It had asked almost 300 people to have a conversation with two mystery partners, one human and one AI, and try to determine which was which. Many couldn't. When chatting with OpenAI's ChatGPT GPT‐4.5, which had been asked to adopt a "human‐like persona", it was judged to be human 73 per cent of the time. Meta's Llama 3 was judged to be human 56 per cent of the time. For the first time, large language models had clearly passed the famous Turing Test, a thought experiment proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, to test just how smart these machines could become and whether they could ever think, like us. While Turing...