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Why AI Won’t Be Conscious in the Near Future
AI consciousness is far off: the part of us that feels the present isn’t in words yet.
Is AI conscious? I don’t think so, and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. The reason lies in your own head, in the two halves of your brain.
Your brain has two hemispheres, the left and the right. Both have functions that are specific to them. Language mostly resides in the left hemisphere, and nonverbal sense mostly resides in the right.
AI deals with things that live in the left hemisphere only: the interpretations, not the sense, feelings, and emotions that are being interpreted.
Why AI feels like it’s deciding
What fascinates you when you talk to AI is how it makes decisions. How it goes through books and articles in seconds, and then outputs meaningful sentences that an intelligent human being would have said.
This fascination is what gives the illusion of consciousness. What you observe is that somebody is making decisions. In fact, a trained model is just following the choices of its makers and trainers. The AI is not making a decision; they are.
If you see this clearly, that AI is not making any choices, then the algorithm seems like a…
