Hassabis wants useful AI tools before machine consciousness

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 20:30

   So you've talked about AI consistently as a tool, like a telescope or a microscope, astrolabe through the centuries. But when you think about a machine that can model almost anything, let's say it can even model quantum systems, like you pointed out, when does it stop becoming a tool and will that ever happen? Well, my strong feeling is we should, in this sort of mission and journey to build AGI, those of us on that journey, many people in this room, you know, I feel like it would be best to build a tool first, an incredibly intelligent and useful and precise tool, and then cross the next sort of Rubicon.

2. 21:12

   That's already profound enough and has, you know, of course, the tool could start becoming more and more autonomous and agent-like that we're all seeing. We're in the midst of that, the agent era now. But then there's a further step of like, you know, does it have agency? Is it conscious? These sorts of questions, which are also going to be questions we're going to need to address. But I would recommend we do that as a second step, perhaps using the tool in the first step to help us with those next profound questions.

3. 21:44

   And ideally, also, we could understand our own brain and minds better and define things like consciousness a lot more precisely than we can today. Do you have estimations of what that definition of consciousness might look like? No, I mean, I haven't got much to add beyond that thousands of years of philosophy hasn't said already. but I mean it's very clear to me that it's obvious some components are going to be needed they're probably necessary but not sufficient like things like self-awareness and you know the idea of self and other some kind of continuity over time so some of these things are clearly needed for anything that might look like consciousness but I mean obviously it's an open question as to as to what the full definition is and I've talked to many of the great philosophers about that. Daniel Dennett obviously sadly passed away recently, but we had a long conversation a

4. 22:35

   few years back about this. And I think one of the issues is how does a system behave? Does it behave like a conscious system? So you could argue some of the AI systems might end up being able to do that as they get close to AGI. But then there's still the question of why do we think each other are conscious? One is the way we're behaving. We're behaving like conscious beings. But the other thing is we're running on the same substrate so i think if both those things are true then it's parsimonious to imagine you're you're experiencing the same thing i'm experiencing which is why we don't have that debate uh about you know normally about are each other conscious but i think we'll obviously we'll never have the substrate equivalence with an artificial system um so there'll always be a i think it'll be hard to to completely close that gap so you can look at it

5. 23:23

   behaviorally, but what about experientially? There are probably some ways to do that post-AGI, but maybe it's a bit about out of scope today, even for AI for science discussion. Brilliant.