AI and Consciousness: Navigating the Interplay of Mind and Machine BY MATHILDA MULERT
Just five days after its launch in November 2022, OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) large language model, ChatGPT, acquired 1 million users. In comparison, Facebook celebrated this milestone after roughly 10 months, while Netflix had to wait for 3.5 years. By now, many universities have implemented ChatGPT policies, and the use of AI in healthcare, criminal justice, and governance is rapidly growing. One thing is clear: AI is here, and it is here to stay. As we adjust to a technological landscape where AI becomes increasingly humanlike, a cascade of philosophical questions emerges. At the helm of this discourse are the two influential philosophical thinkers; Alan Turing and John Searle. Through their lenses, we embark on a journey that asks: Does intelligence require consciousness? Can these two concepts exist independently? And what ethical implications might this have?
The test works as follows: Imagine three participants are engaging in a conversation through a computer interface (like texting). There is a human interrogator, a human responder, and a machine responder. The interrogator’s task is to chat to both respondents without knowing which one is the human and which one is the machine. The machine passes the Turing Test if the interrogator is not able to consistently distinguish between the responses of the human and the machine. If this is the case, Turing argues, the machine can be considered intelligent.
Alan Turing and the Turing Test In 1950, when the concept of computers itself was in its infancy, English mathematician, computer scientist and philosopher Alan Turing published his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. In it, Turing introduced his Turing Test, designed to assess the intelligence of machines through their ability to mimic human conversation.
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