Susan Schneider on How to Prevent a Zombie Dictatorship
Last week I posted "How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot", discussing Susan Schneider's recent TEDx-talk proposal for checking whether silicon chips can be conscious. Susan has written the following reply, which she invited me to share on the blog.
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Eric,
Greetings from a café in Lisbon! Your new, seriously cool I,Brain case raises an important point about my original test in my Ted talk and is right out of a cyberpunk novel. A few initial points, for readers, before I respond, as Ted talks don’t give much philosophical detail:
1. It may be that the microchips are made of something besides silicon, (right now, e.g., carbon nanotubes and graphene are alternate substrates under development). I don’t think this matters – the issues that arise are the same.
2. It will be important that any chip test involve the very kind of chip substrate and design as that used in the AI in question.
3. Even if a kind of chip works in humans, there is still the issue of whether the AI in question has the right functional organization for consciousness. Since AI could be very different than us, and it is even difficult to figure out these issues in the case of biological creatures like the octopus, this may turn out to be very difficult.
4. For relation of the chip test to intriguing ideas of Ned Block and Dave Chalmers on this issue, see a paper on my website (a section in “The Future of Philosophy of Mind”, based on an earlier op-ed of mine.)
5. As Eric knows, it is probably a mistake to assume that brain chips will be functional isomorphs. I’m concerned with the development of real, emerging technologies, because I am concerned with finding a solution to the problem of AI consciousness based on an actual test. Brain chips, already under development at DARPA, may eventually be faster and more efficient information processors, enhance human consciousness, or, they may be low fidelity copies of what a given minicolumn does. This depends upon how medicine progresses...
Back to my original “Chip Test” (in the Ted talk). It’s 2045. You are ready to upgrade your aging brain. You go to I,Brain. They can gradually replace parts of your biological brain with microchips. You are awake during the surgery, suppose, and they replace a part of your biological brain that is responsible for some aspect of consciousness, with a microchip. Do you lose consciousness of something (e.g., do you lose part of your visual field)? If so, you will probably notice. This would be a sign that the microchip is the wrong stuff. Science could try and try to engineer a better chip, but if after years of trying, they never could get it right, perhaps we should conclude that that kind of substrate (e.g., silicon) does not give rise to consciousness.
On the other hand, if the chips work, that kind of substrate is in principle the right stuff (it can, in the right mental environment, give rise to qualia) although there is a further issue of whether a particular AI that has such chips has the right organization to be conscious (e.g., maybe it has nothing like a global workspace, like a Rodney Brooks style robot, or maybe it is superintelligent, and has mastered everything already and eliminated consciousness because it is too slow and inefficient).
Eric, your test is different, and I agree that someone should not trust that test. This would involve a systematic deception. What kind of society would do this? A zombie dictatorship, of course, which seeks to secretly eliminate conscious life from the planet. :-)
But I think you want to apply your larger point to the original test. Is the idea: couldn’t a chip be devised that would falsely indicate consciousness to the person? (Let’s call this a “sham qualia chip.” ) I think it is, so here’s a reply: God yes, in a dystopian world. We had better watch out! That would be horrible medicine…and luckily, it would involve a good deal of expense and effort, (systematically fooling someone about say, their visual experience, would be a major undertaking), so science would likely first seek a genuine chip substitute that preserved consciousness. (Would a sham qualia chip even clear the FDA :-) ? Maybe only if microchips were not the right stuff and it was the best science could do. After all, people would always be missing lost visual qualia, and it is best that they not suffer like this....). But crucially, since this would involve a deliberate effort on the part of medical researchers, we would know this, and so we would know that the chip is not a true substitute. Unless, that is, we are inhabitants of a zombie dictatorship.
The upshot: It would involve a lot of extra engineering effort to produce a sham qualia chip, and we would hopefully know that the sham chip was really a device designed to fool us. If this was done because the genuine chip substitute could not be developed, this would probably indicate that chips aren’t the right stuff, or that science needs to go back to the drawing board.
I propose a global ban on sham qualia chips in interest of preserving democracy.
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I (Eric) have some thoughts in response. I'm not sure it would be harder to make a sham qualia chip than a genuine qualia chip. Rather than going into detail on that now, I'll let it brew for a future post. Meanwhile, others' reactions welcomed too!