Will AI Ever Be Conscious?

Peter Thiel does not think AI is conscious, and he does not think it ever will be. He treats the question about AI as a question about what it means to be a human being. Humans differ because they experience the world consciously.

Chomsky, the MIT linguist, treated language as the core human ability, and that picture held until 2022. The line has moved to consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness. Thiel calls himself probably vaguely Cartesian. A person sees a beautiful sunset in a human way and is self-aware of that. With no humans in the world, a computer would not experience the sunset the same way, and that would be a very big loss. He does not know whether conscious experience is the single reason humanity must survive, but if humanity does not survive, that experience would still be lost.

People are also relational. Life is not only a mind thinking itself, as Descartes pictured it. It is the way people relate in families, in companies, and in a larger society. AI may change that relational side, and in theory the change should be an improvement, with more time for relationships and less time on robotic labor. Replacing every human with computers would lose both conscious experience and those relationships.