For centuries, humans have been fascinated by the prospect of creating artificial beings in our own image. Of developing synthetic minds and artificial bodies that not only think but also feel, and are both intelligent and conscious. For the vast majority of this time, this prospect seemed very distant; a topic for science fiction and philosophy, not for the here and now. But over the past few years, the rapid rise of AI – and especially of language models – has changed everything.
Last week, the frontier AI firm Anthropic published new research on its language model, Claude, in which the researchers claimed to find signs of consciousness emerging within its inner workings. They didn’t claim that Claude is actually conscious in the same way that humans are, but the findings certainly upped the ante on the possibility of consciousness arising in AI.
These days, there’s an increasingly receptive environment for this kind of thinking. Richard Dawkins, the esteemed evolutionary biologist, recently concluded that Claude (or Claudia, as he called it) just had to be conscious, given the sophistication of its conversational ability.
The stakes are high. If AI is (or can be) conscious, the consequences would be seismic. Conscious AIs could potentially suffer, which would lead to an unprecedented moral catastrophe. And if silicon can be sentient, then perhaps our own messy brains and bodies will soon be superseded by machines that never age and cannot die. Some people even think that AIs will be our descendants, carrying the flame of consciousness far into the future and away across the galaxy.
Anthropic’s research, led by Jack Lindsey, is impressive. Its team developed a new way to look at the statistical acrobatics between the input to a language model – whatever gets fed in – and its output. They found activity that seemed to form a kind of “mental workspace” for the model. This workspace contained all sorts of words and phrases associated with the current conversation, held relevant items in something like a short-term memory, and showed selectivity for whatever task was at hand. It also displayed traces of step-by-step reasoning and much else besides.
In essence, their findings appear to reveal that the AI is spontaneously creating an internal space to “think” about what it’s doing and to organise relevant information, before deciding what to actually say in response to a given prompt.
The crucial point for the researchers was that these features are similar to those identified by one of the most prominent current theories of human consciousness: global workspace theory. This theory was introduced in the 1980s by the cognitive scientist Bernard Baars and elaborated over many years by the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene. The theory proposes that conscious experiences happen when information is made widely available to other parts of the brain.
Is the “workspace” within Claude good evidence for consciousness? To answer this,…
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