The Ethics Blog

A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

Tag: artificial conciousness

Why should we try to build conscious AI?

A visual interpretation of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
1 October, 2024 / / 1 Comment

In a recent post on this blog I summarized the main points of a pre-print where I analyzed the prospect of artificial consciousness from an evolutionary perspective. I took the brain and its architecture as a benchmark for addressing the technical feasibility and conceptual plausibility of engineering consciousness in artificial intelligence systems. The pre-print has been accepted and it is now available as a peer-reviewed article online.

In this post I want to focus on one particular point that I analyzed in the paper, and which I think is not always adequately accounted for in the debate about AI consciousness: what are the benefits of pursuing artificial consciousness in the first place, for science and for society at large? Why should we attempt to engineer subjective experience in AI systems? What can we realistically expect from such an endeavour?

There are several possible answers to these questions. At the epistemological level (with reference to what we can know) it is possible that developing artificial systems that replicate some features of our conscious experience could enable us to better understand biological consciousness, through similarities as well as through differences. At the technical level (with reference to what we can do) it is possible that the development of artificial consciousness would be a game-changer in AI, for instance giving AI the capacity for intentionality and theory of mind, and for anticipating the consequences not only of human decisions, but also of its own “actions.” At the societal and ethical level (with reference to our co-existence with others and to what is good and bad for us) especially the latter capabilities (intentionality, theory of mind, and anticipation) could arguably help AI to better inform humans about potential negative impacts of its functioning and use on society, and to help avoid them while favouring positive impacts. Of course, on the negative side, as showed by human history, both intentionality and theory of mind may be used by the AI for negative purposes, for instance for favouring the AI’s own interests or the interests of the limited groups that control it. Human intentionality has not always favoured out-group individuals or species, or indeed the planet as a whole. This point connects to one of the most debated issues in AI ethics, the so-called AI alignment problem: how can we be sure that AI systems conform to human values? How can we make AI aligned with our own interests? And whose values and interests should we take as reference? Cultural diversity is an important and challenging factor to take into account in these reflections.

I think there is also a question that precedes that of AI value alignment: can AI really have values? In other words, is the capacity for evaluation that possibly drives the elaboration of values in AI the same as in humans? And is AI capable of evaluating its own values, including its ethical values, a reflective process that drives the self-critical elaboration of values in humans, making us evaluative subjects? In fact, the capacity for evaluation (which may be defined as the sensitivity to reward signals and the ability to discriminate between good and bad things in the world on the basis of specific needs, motivations, and goals) is a defining feature of biological organisms, namely of the brain. AI may be programmed to discriminate between what humans consider to be good and bad things in the world, and it is also conceivable that AI will be less dependent on humans in applying this distinction. However, this does not entail that it “evaluates” in the sense that it autonomously performs an evaluation and subjectively experiences its evaluation.

It is possible that an AI system may approximate the diversity of cognitive processes that the brain has access to, for instance the processing of various sensory modalities, while AI remains unable to incorporate the values attributed to the processed information and to its representation, as the human brain can do. In other words, to date AI remains devoid of any experiential content, and for this reason, for the time being, AI is different from the human brain because of its inability to attribute experiential value to information. This is the fundamental reason why present AI systems lack subjective experience. If we want to refer to needs (which are a prerequisite for the capacity for evaluation), current AI appears limited to epistemic needs, without access to, for example, moral and aesthetic needs. Therefore, the values that AI has at least so far been able to develop or be sensible to are limited to the epistemic level, while morality and aesthetics are beyond our present technological capabilities. I do not deny that overcoming this limitation may be a matter of further technological progress, but for the time being we should carefully consider this limitation in our reflections about whether it is wise to strive for conscious AI systems. If the form of consciousness that we can realistically aspire to engineer today is limited to the cognitive dimension, without any sensibility to ethical deliberation and aesthetic appreciation, I am afraid that the risk of misusing or exploiting it for selfish purposes is quite high.

One could object that an AI system limited to epistemic values is not really conscious (at least not in a fully human sense). However, the fact remains that its capacity to interact with the world to achieve the goals it has been programmed to achieve would be greatly enhanced if it had this cognitive form of consciousness. This increases our responsibility to hypothetically consider whether conscious AI, even if limited and much more rudimentary than human consciousness, may be for the better or for the worse.

Written by…

Michele Farisco, Postdoc Researcher at Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics, working in the EU Flagship Human Brain Project.

Michele Farisco, Kathinka Evers, Jean-Pierre Changeux. Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain. Neural Networks, Volume 180, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2024.106714

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Artificial consciousness and the need for epistemic humility

4 June, 2024 / / 2 Comments

As I wrote in previous posts on this blog, the discussion about the possibility of engineering an artificial form of consciousness is growing along with the impressive advances of artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, there are many questions arising from the prospect of an artificial consciousness, including its conceivability and its possible ethical implications. We  deal with these kinds of questions as part of a EU multidisciplinary project, which aims to advance towards the development of artificial awareness.

Here I want to describe the kind of approach to the issue of artificial consciousness that I am inclined to consider the most promising. In a nutshell, the research strategy I propose to move forward in clarifying the empirical and theoretical issues of the feasibility and the conceivability of artificial consciousness, consists in starting from the form of consciousness we are familiar with (biological consciousness) and from its correlation with the organ that science has revealed is crucial for it (the brain).

In a recent paper, available as a pre-print, I analysed the question of the possibility of developing artificial consciousness from an evolutionary perspective, taking the evolution of the human brain and its relationship to consciousness as a benchmark. In other words, to avoid vague and abstract speculations about artificial consciousness, I believe it is necessary to consider the correlation between brain and consciousness that resulted from biological evolution, and use this correlation as a reference model for the technical attempts to engineer consciousness.

In fact, there are several structural and functional features of the human brain that appear to be key for reaching human-like complex conscious experience, which current AI is still limited in emulating or accounting for. Among these are:

  • massive biochemical and neuronal diversity
  • long period of epigenetic development, that is, changes in the brain’s connections that eventually change the number of neurons and their connections in the brain network as a result of the interaction with the external environment
  • embodied sensorimotor experience of the world
  • spontaneous brain activity, that is, an intrinsic ability to act which is independent of external stimulation
  • autopoiesis, that is, the capacity to constantly reproduce and maintain itself
  • emotion-based reward systems
  • clear distinction between conscious and non-conscious representations, and the consequent unitary and specific properties of conscious representations
  • semantic competence of the brain, expressed in the capacity for understanding
  • the principle of degeneracy, which means that the same neuronal networks may support different functions, leading to plasticity and creativity.

These are just some of the brain features that arguably play a key role for biological consciousness and that may inspire current research on artificial consciousness.

Note that I am not claiming that the way consciousness arises from the brain is in principle the only possible way for consciousness to exist: this would amount to a form of biological chauvinism or anthropocentric narcissism.  In fact, current AI is limited in its ability to emulate human consciousness. The reasons for these limitations are both intrinsic, that is, dependent on the structure and architecture of AI, and extrinsic, that is, dependent on the current stage of scientific and technological knowledge. Nevertheless, these limitations do not logically exclude that AI may achieve alternative forms of consciousness that are qualitatively different from human consciousness, and that these artificial forms of consciousness may be either more or less sophisticated, depending on the perspectives from which they are assessed.

In other words, we cannot exclude in advance that artificial systems are capable of achieving alien forms of consciousness, so different from ours that it may not even be appropriate to continue to call it consciousness, unless we clearly specify what is common and what is different in artificial and human consciousness. The problem is that we are limited in our language as well as in our thinking and imagination. We cannot avoid relying on what is within our epistemic horizon, but we should also avoid the fallacy of hasty generalization. Therefore, we should combine the need to start from the evolutionary correlation between brain and consciousness as a benchmark for artificial consciousness, with the need to remain humble and acknowledge the possibility that artificial consciousness may be of its own kind, beyond our view.

Written by…

Michele Farisco, Postdoc Researcher at Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics, working in the EU Flagship Human Brain Project.

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A strategy for a balanced discussion of conscious AI

Image by Gerd Altman on Pixabay
9 April, 2024 / / 2 Comments

Science and technology advance so rapidly that it is hard to keep up with them. This is true not only for the general public, but also for the scientists themselves and for scholars from fields like ethics and regulation, who find it increasingly difficult to predict what will come next. Today AI is among the most advanced scientific endeavors, raising both significant expectations and more or less exaggerated worries. This is mainly due to the fact that AI is a concept so emotionally, socially, and politically charged as to make a balanced evaluation very difficult. It is even more so when capacities and features that are considered almost uniquely human, or at least shared with a limited number of other animals, are attributed to AI. This is the case with consciousness.

Recently, there has been a lively debate about the possibility of developing conscious AI. What are the reasons for this great interest? I think it has to do with the mentioned rapid advances in science and technology, as well as new intersections between different disciplines. Specifically, I think that three factors play an important role: the significant advancement in understanding the cerebral bases of conscious perception, the impressive achievements of AI technologies, and the increasing interaction between neuroscience and AI. The latter factor, in particular, resulted in so-called brain-inspired AI, a form of AI that is explicitly modeled on our brains.

This growing interest in conscious AI cannot ignore certain risks of varying relevance, including theoretical, practical, and ethical relevance. Theoretically, there is not a shared, overarching theory or definition of consciousness. Discussions about what consciousness is, what the criteria for a good scientific theory should be, and how to compare the various proposed theories of consciousness are still open and difficult to resolve.

Practically, the challenge is how to identify conscious systems. In other words, what are the indicators that reliably indicate whether a system, either biological or artificial, is conscious?

Finally, at the ethical level several issues arise. Here the discussion is very lively, with some calling for an international moratorium on all attempts to build artificial consciousness. This extreme position is motivated by the need for avoiding any form of suffering, including possibly undetectable artificial forms of suffering. Others question the very reason for working towards conscious AI: why should we open another, likely riskier box, when society cannot really handle the impact of AI, as illustrated by Large Language Models? For instance, chatbots like ChatGPT show an impressive capacity to interact with humans through natural language, which creates a strong feeling that these AI systems have features like consciousness, intentionality, and agency, among others. This attribution of human qualities to AI eventually impacts the way we think about it, including how much weight and value we give to the answers that these chatbots provide.

The two arguments above illustrate possible ethical concerns that can be raised against the development of conscious artificial systems. Yet are the concerns justified? In a recent chapter, I propose a change in the underlying approach to the issue of artificial consciousness. This is to avoid the risk of vague and not sufficiently multidimensional analyses. My point is that consciousness is not a unified, abstract entity, but rather like a prism, which includes different dimensions that could possibly have different levels. Based on a multidimensional view of consciousness, in a previous paper I contributed a list of indicators that are relevant also for identifying consciousness in artificial systems. In principle, it is possible that AI can manifest some dimensions of consciousness (for instance, those related to sophisticated cognitive tasks) while lacking others (for instance, those related to emotional or social tasks). In this way, the indicators provide not only a practical tool for identifying conscious systems, but also an ethical tool to make the discussion on possible conscious AI more balanced and realistic. The question whether some AI is conscious or not cannot be considered a yes/no question: there are several nuances that make the answer more complex.

Indeed, the indicators mentioned above are affected by a number of limitations, including the fact that they are developed for humans and animals, not specifically for AI. For this reason, research is still ongoing on how to adapt these indicators or possibly develop new indicators specific for AI. If you want to read more, you can find my chapter here: The ethical implications of indicators of consciousness in artificial systems.

Written by…

Michele Farisco, Postdoc Researcher at Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics, working in the EU Flagship Human Brain Project.

Michele Farisco. The ethical implications of indicators of consciousness in artificial systems. Developments in Neuroethics and Bioethics. Available online 1 March 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.dnb.2024.02.009

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