Given how hot AI has been lately, there’s a regular debate about whether AI will become conscious. When could we say that it’s … sentient? That it has a mind?
I’m not gonna give you that answer, or even try. There is no widely-agreed-upon definition of what it means to be conscious, or how consciousness emerges in humans. It’s a super interesting question, and definitely important to explore! But as yet unanswered: Philosophers and scientist still hotly argue over it. Indeed, if you’ve heard any tech dudes proclaiming that today’s large-language-model chatbots are “conscious” or “sentient” or “alive” or whatevs, you are very likely in the presence of an argument that is, as we say, not even wrong.