I, robot? AI and consciousness

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1:27Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

1:31Ann Wroe:And I'm Rosie Bloor.

1:37Today on the show, the surge of sexually transmitted infections in Europe and a tribute to Ezra Pound's translator daughter.

1:51First up, though.

2:01It's kind of amazing that a computer program from the 1960s still has such influence in what we talk about now, still in the dawn of the generative AI era. Eliza was, in essence, the first chatbot, the brainchild of a computer scientist at MIT in 1966. In today's terms, it was primitive. All list referencing and pattern matching and bouncing users' statements back rephrased as questions. The weird part was how those users often had the conviction they were typing to a machine that was thinking. Conscious even. Since then, it's been called the Eliza Effect. A reminder that humans are still kinda bad at determining what is conscious.

2:46And what consciousness is.

2:50Alok Jha:The idea that machines could have emotions, can talk to us, have their own desires, and maybe even take over the world, all of that is a classic of science fiction. But it's always felt really far away, until now. Alec Jaw is The Economist's science and technology editor and hosts Babbage, our sister show on science. There's this conversation going on amongst computer scientists and philosophers about whether modern machines, the large language models that we are interacting with on a daily basis, whether these things could develop some of those magical conscious properties. So you've used the really big word there, conscious.

3:31Easy starter for 10. Do we even know what consciousness is?

3:35Alok Jha:No, not really. Consciousness, I think we know it when we feel it. We know that we wake up in the morning, we see the sky, we have a feeling when we see the blue sky. when we drink coffee we have that sharp tang when you smell a rose you feel great those are thoughts sort of the effects of consciousness it's this inner theater we have inside us that tell us about all the sensory things going on in the world in recent years it's been split into two types to try and understand it there's phenomenal consciousness which is what we've just been talking about which is this idea of what does it feel like to be something and then a more sort of pedestrian version of consciousness called access consciousness and that's more about how the brain processes information so the idea there is that your access consciousness allows your brain to become aware of information from the world so you know you see something with your eyes and you feel whatever you feel when you see it but then that information is made available to all the other modules in your brain to then respond to that's access consciousness this is just an attempt to sort of try and allow philosophers and scientists of all types to try and find reasons and explanations for these very mysterious things.

4:40So with all that in mind then how to even start going about answering the question about AIs being conscious?

4:47Alok Jha:People have been talking to AIs for a number of years now and there's cases already of people thinking that there's something inside the machine if you remember blake lemoyne the engineer from google in 2022 after talking to a chat bot was convinced that it was somehow conscious and it had its own feelings and didn't want to be turned off and people in the wider sort of computer science world thought you know that's ridiculous you know these are just machines that follow probabilistic computer programs i think that at that point people were less convinced but now given how complicated and sophisticated the responses are from things like Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini and the number of people who have actual relationships with these things.

5:28Alok Jha:Some people have ended up marrying these chatbots. I'm not saying that these chatbots are conscious, but the point is that more people are thinking about them because they feel something within the conversations, right? But an increasingly good simulation of consciousness is still not consciousness. The knife that we need to find is what divides seeming conscious from being conscious. You hit the nail on the head. So these machines are really good mimics. They know everything about human culture through the training data they've had. Like they've had trillions of words of books and novels and all sorts in there.

6:02Alok Jha:And so they know how to respond to things in a way that would make them seem human. So what you have to actually do is look inside the neural networks. So you have to look inside the thousands of layers of computer code that sort of takes an input that you give it, computes it in lots of different ways, and then gives you an output. So you have to look inside there for clues that the machine can't invent, basically. But let's wind back a bit here. What is the evidence that AI even could become conscious? So evidence of consciousness is hard to come by because we don't really know what it's like in humans.

6:38Alok Jha:But some interesting results have come out of the computer science world. So Anthropik have published a paper recently that shows that Claude has a kind of mental notice board inside its neural networks that the user of Claude doesn't know exists. And so when Claude is talking to you, it's thinking lots of things that aren't apparent to you. And this mental workspace, the J space, wasn't programmed into Claude. It emerged through training as a sort of mechanism to allow it to come up with answers better. And so it's very similar to the kind of neural structures that humans have in their brains.

7:15Alok Jha:One of the main theories of human consciousness is called global workspace theory, the idea that there's a bit of your brain that if information gets into that bit, so from the senses, then it's broadcast everywhere in your brain and you become conscious of that bit of information. So the J space in Claude seems to be doing something similar. Now, you've got to be careful. They're not exactly the same thing. And the J-space doesn't perform all the functions that the global workspace and human brains would do. But the point is that if these things emerge in computer networks, then what else has emerged in there that's similar to the kinds of things that you might need in the human brain for consciousness?

7:54Alok Jha:The point is that there's this whole new field of computer neuroscience that's going on to try and find these things. And if you can find enough of them that are similar in neural networks versus human brains, then you start to sort of come up with a more sort of global hypothesis around what consciousness might look like in these machines compared to humans. But there's a lot wrapped up in those words compared to humans, right? Like they will be different. There's a school of thought that basically living things have consciousness and machines don't, can't. So you're right. For a lot of people, consciousness is tied to biology.

8:28Alok Jha:And in fact, that's one of the sides of this debate, which says that without biology then consciousness just can't exist you can simulate the brain in even better ways using neural networks and computer simulations and all of that but actually you miss out all the sort of messiness of biology and since we don't really know what consciousness is it could be that one of these bits of messiness in biology is the seat of the consciousness and you've missed all of that out the other side of the debate is saying that it's not the biology that's important it's the fact that the brain can do loads and loads of computations that's what makes it special and it's only the computation that matters it doesn't matter where the computation is happening it happens to be going on in neurons in the human brain but it doesn't matter if it's going on in silicon chips in ais and so if the latter group the computational functionalists as they're called if they are right then there's no reason at all why ais could not be conscious in fact anything that can make calculations in sufficient ways would eventually become conscious Okay, we've gone just about as far as we can go on this thorny question in the time allotted.

9:30Just tell me this, you've spoken to countless scientists, philosophers, all sorts of people about this. Where have you landed on this question?

9:36Alok Jha:So I started reporting this thinking, it's not possible, right? Humans are conscious, many animals are conscious, and biology seems to be the deceit of it all. But when you strip down all the arguments and talk to all the philosophers and computer scientists involved, and you realize the importance of computation, you know, making calculations and how far that gets you then you know where i've landed i guess in talking to all these people and reporting this piece is that the door can't be closed you can't categorically say that it's not possible now i know that's a bit of a sort of a cop-out answer because it's kind of saying i don't know but it's kind of i don't know but in a sort of leaning yes direction i can't see a reason why even if the modern lms are not conscious and no one thinks that the current versions are the future ones as they get more sophisticated they get more brain-like they seem to develop all these tools and structures that allow them to do things in human ways that point towards consciousness and then if you think about the sort of next generation or even the generation after that of the kinds of neural networks that will be created so they're made of silicon chips right now but people are already putting human brain cells onto silicon chips the growing organoids so like mini 3d brains to do computations in 10 years time if data centers are full of those sorts of brains and those sorts of neural networks made of actual human brains.

10:52Alok Jha:I mean, come on, you've reintroduced the biology. So the people who thought that it had to be living to be conscious, they're also satisfied. So everything points in the direction that these things will become conscious. And even as I say it, I struggle to think that that will be true, but you've got to look at the facts sometimes and think, well, that's just the way it is. Alec, thanks very much for your time. You're very welcome.

11:46Transcription by CastingWords and social experiment in human history. He reckons AIs will come to control civilization and considers what it'll mean to be a human in that world. If you're a digital subscriber, Insider is already included in your subscription. If you're listening for free, you can watch extended clips via the link in the show notes. Thank you. projects faster and scale support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork. AI-powered shortlisting delivers a curated shortlist of top freelancers matched to your goals in under six hours.

12:51No endless searching required. Thousands of growing businesses already trust Upwork to hire highly skilled freelance professionals for everything from one-off projects to ongoing support. It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com. Upwork.com. Hey, I've got the campaign brief ready, built from last quarter's data and the competitive landscape. Approved? Oh, agents, where would we be without you? Somewhere with a lot more tabs open.

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13:36Ann Wroe:You may have heard that we're in something of a sex recession. In the rich world, we're socialising less, dating less and having less sex in general. If that all sounds pretty miserable, maybe don't look this way for further cheer. Because even if you are having sex, some rather unpleasant things are on the rise. There's been a big rise in cases of sexually transmitted infections across Europe. Stephen Herford is a writer on our digital team. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, recorded cases of gonorrhea were three times higher in 2024 than they were a decade ago.

14:16So that's something like 100 ,000 cases in all the countries surveyed. Syphilis cases have also more than doubled over the same period. Chlamydia is slightly different, so that's actually fallen in recent years, but it is still by far the most prevalent in Europe.

14:32Ann Wroe:And why this outbreak of STDs? I think it's important to say that the amount of testing you do will often increase the number of infections you find. That's sort of unavoidable in these epidemiological studies. And that may well explain some of the increase in recent years. But what's interesting is that there has been a big jump after COVID, which can be explained partly by the resumption of testing services after the pandemic. You see a bit of a dip in 2020 and then it comes back in 2021. but the ECDC and clinicians I've spoken to, they've said that it doesn't explain the full upsurge in gonorrhea and syphilis, which is coming through in the data.

15:08One theory that gets put out a lot, and I think it might pop into quite a few people's minds, is that the rise of dating apps have changed sexual behavior. They've made people more promiscuous, or in the jargon, they've changed sexual networks. But actually, there is scant data for this. For one thing, the usage of data to apps largely predates the big spike. Another idea that's put around is that there's been a decline in condom use. So the data to support this is also quite limited, which isn't to say it isn't, it's just not too clear. And then there's the use of PrEP, which is a daily pill that can prevent HIV from developing.

15:45That may correlate with reduced condom use among some men, but bear in mind that PrEP users are also more likely to be tested, so there's regular screening for people who take it. and that might influence the results slightly there.

15:57Ann Wroe:So if we don't really know why there's this increase, do we know who's being infected? Well, okay, let's take gender first. So older men seem to be more at risk here. So in the latest data, gonorrhea rates fell among men under 24, but they increased among older men. Among women, though gonorrhea rates actually fell in the most recent data, they do remain above pre-COVID levels, but syphilis rates in that data set rose. The biggest increase was among younger women and then this is happening across sexual orientations so although men who have sex with men tend to be at higher risk syphilis and gonorrhea rates have also risen sharply among heterosexual men and women since the pandemic.

16:40Geographically it's quite difficult to make country by country comparisons just because of the way surveillance and testing systems differ but trends showing what is happening within countries over time are more reliable. And we're seeing some of the steepest rises in gonorrhea, for example, in Bulgaria, France, Italy, and then Belgium and Hungary saw sharp increases in syphilis. Both diseases interestingly spiked in Lithuania and Malta. So there's a bit of a mixed picture going on.

17:07Ann Wroe:So the rise in infections seems to be real. We don't really know why. It probably means more people are having unprotected sex. has there been a change in public health campaigns about the use of condoms? That is something that came up again and again in the conversations I had. There's a general sense that people are less aware of safe sex these days. I mean, all the clinicians I spoke to were convinced that the fear factor, I suppose, that would have driven people to wear condoms at a higher rate in the past is in there. This is a huge public health problem then, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, beyond the initial illnesses caused by these diseases, is if they're left untreated, chlamydia and gonorrhea can lead to severe long-term complications.

17:50But I think one of the most alarming things that experts are seeing is this jump in congenital syphilis. That's where the mother passes it on to her baby. This is thought to be spiking because of higher syphilis rates in the general population. It's quite a rare disease, but it can often be fatal or cause lifelong rehabilitation.

18:09Ann Wroe:What can health authorities do? Well, for one thing, targeted responses can be very effective. So, for example, there was a spike in congenital syphilis in Hungary recently, and targeting that outbreak can work very well. So with things like antenatal screening, better access to testing generally would help. This is quite uneven across Europe. Something officials will have to bear in mind, though, is that antibiotics are primarily used to treat these diseases. and so they do have to weigh up the benefits of treatment for the individuals against the risk of furthering antimicrobial resistance, which is quite a thorny cost-benefit analysis for them to make.

18:46More generally, aggressive, safe-sex public health campaigns are thought to have proven effective, perhaps unsurprisingly, and heightened awareness and fear of an outbreak can drive action at both the government and the individual level.

19:01Ann Wroe:Stephen, thank you so much for talking to me. Thanks very much for having me.

19:22Ann Wroe:As soon as Mary de Ratchewild was born, she was sent away. Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor. Her parents, the American poet Ezra Pound and his mistress Olga Rudge, an American violinist, simply felt they couldn't cope with a child on the premises. He was too busy with his poetry and she with her violin playing.

19:50Ann Wroe:So they sent her from Venice, where they lived then, to the South Tyrol, to a very kindly family who took in abandoned children, although Mary was not quite abandoned. Ezra and Olga paid 200 lira a month for her keep. And she herself, when she was older than a baby, was very pleased with the arrangement because her two foster parents, Mame and Tata, as she called them, were incredibly comforting and kind, and she loved growing up as a little Tyrellian peasant child. Every so often, however, there would be visits from her parents. There was one occasion when, at night, Ezra Pound, her father, came into her bedroom just to say goodnight and had a look at her hands and saw her nails were filthy with doing farm work all day and took out scissors from his luggage and cut her nails and then asked her if she brushed her teeth.