Perspectives on Machine Consciousness asks whether any AIs are conscious today, whether any future ones could be conscious, how we could know, and what implications machine consciousness would have for us and for them.
As AI improves rapidly in performance and capability, these questions are becoming increasingly important. We do not fully understand how AIs work, and even some of the leading LLM developers say they cannot be sure that today’s models are not sentient, though many people are forming relationships with them, sometimes intimate ones. The book explores consciousness alongside our interactions with AI, including the critical need to avoid committing mind crime by causing artificial minds to suffer, as well as considering that if and when superintelligence arrives, its enormous effect on humanity may be significantly determined by whether or not it is conscious. The authors show that machines becoming conscious means we may learn a great deal about our own consciousness – arguably the most important, and yet most mysterious, thing about us.
This book is required reading for anybody developing advanced AI, working in AI safety, responsible for developing AI policies at organisational or national level, and indeed anybody concerned with the long-term future of humanity.
Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction 1. What is Consciousness? 2. The Spinning Wheel: A Unified Theory of Intelligence and Consciousness 3. Consciousness in Science Fiction Part 2: Feasibility, Pathways, Tests 4. The Mythology of Concious AI 5. Are Any Machines Conscious Today? 6. The Evidence for AI Consciousness Today 7. Are There Conscious AIs? The Quantum Darwinist Theory of Consciousness 8. How Could Consciousness be Cultivated in a Machine? 9. Artificial Consciousness and the Free Energy Principle 10. Could Neuromorphic Computing Facilitate Consciousness? 11. Is Embodiment Necessary for Consciousness? 12. Does the Body Matter? Perspectives on the Embodied Nature of Consciousness 13. Many Ways of Being Minded: Neurodivergence and AI Consciousness 14. The Turing Test for Consciousness, Not Intelligence 15. Machine Consciousness and Mind Uploading 16. Selected, Blind Gropings of the Elephant of Consciousness Part 3: Implications 17. Public Beliefs about AI Sentience 18. What Should We Do When We're Uncertain about Machine Consciousness? 19. Suspensive Coherence: What Machine Consciousness Demands of Us 20. The Case against Deploying Conscious-seeming AIs 21.AI Consciousness Will Divide Society 22. The Needs of Digital Minds 23. The Ant You Can Save 24. The Wibbly Line: It’s Time for Practical Policies 25. Should the First Superintelligence be Conscious? 26. Coda: Conscium Manifesto
About the Author :
Calum Chace spent 30 years in business and journalism, mostly in strategy consulting. He has written several best-selling books on the future of AI, and has given keynote talks in over 20 countries. He is a co-founder and CMO of Conscium.
Ted Lappas is an expert in spatio-temporal computation and neural architectures for multimodal data. He jointly leads WPP's AI Lab, and is an assistant professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business. He is a co-founder and CTO of Conscium.
