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Disputing the possibility of AI consciousness requires one of two beliefs, both of which I find implausible:
1. Consciousness is linked to certain capabilities that AI will also never possess. If someone believes this, I’d be happy to make a bet with them.
2. Consciousness can be totally divorced from capabilities, meaning it’s extraneous. Useless. It’s not the source of any of our insight or creativity or even the cause of us talking about consciousness! This is the position where philosophical zombies are possible. Then the question becomes “why do humans have consciousness?” If it’s irrelevant for capabilities, it seems odd that evolution would have produced it. And it certainly feels like our subjective states are part of the causal chain! And “feels like” is all we really have to go on when it comes to consciousness.
Personally, I think evolution produced consciousness because it had to, because it is linked to or synonymous with certain capabilities, and so sufficiently powerful AI systems will also have it.
*note: the term “consciousness” is notoriously vague. I tried to structure this argument in a way that’s agnostic to someone’s precise definition and can be substituted with “whatever special thing you think humans have”