[mattclarkdotnet]

What? Nobody says cubic zirconia is an artificial diamond, it’s just a different shiny crystal. We have loads of actual artificial diamonds, so cheap you can get a cutting disc made fr9m them for $10 at home depot.

And nobody working in the space either as ML/AI practitioners, or as philosophers, or as cognitive scientists, even thinks we know what consciousness is, or what is required to create it. So there would be no way to tell if an AI is conscious because we haven’t yet managed to reliably tell if humans, or dogs, or chimpanzees or whales are conscious.

The claim that is often made is that more work on the current generation of AI tech will lead to AGI at a human or better level. I agree with Yann Lecun that this is unlikely.

[WalterBright]

I'm pretty sure mammals and birds are conscious. Insects, probably not.

[falcor84]

Why? Are you arguing that insects are purely automatons? I personally don't have a strong view on insects, but my intuition is that there are different degrees of consciousness, and feel natural to attribute some consciousness to insects, and even individual amoebas, and maybe even (as in Chalmers's famous example) to thermostats.

I would draw a separate line around sapience, and particularly the capacity for suffering, maybe indeed attributing it to mammals and birds but not insects, but consciousness seems more widespread to me.

[mattclarkdotnet]

If you were to force the choice I might agree. But I’d prefer to think there’s likely a sliding scale in operation here. Even humans aren’t conscious all the time, or equally conscious at all times. It will be an amazing day when we figure this out.