Rarely in life do we experience absolute awe at the stunning, simultaneously an overwhelming sense of dread, terrifying aura of unknown in the midst of miracle. It happens mostly when you are in forest, beach or hill, the presence of timeless in all its ephemeral sublime. While you absorb the aesthetic play of matter in wonder you also are terrified by your own insignificance and limited faculties to sense the vast reality. Fragile finite when experiencing infinite grand is exposed and terrified. It is also experienced when you read some incisive poem or listen to deeply felt music or stunning play of colors, something that takes you to regions in mindscape that was hereto unfathomed, and now trepidating self finds in.
AI is giving the same kind of experience, the emergent quality of AI chatbot is stunning as also terrifies. It is as if I am in presence of something way superior meanwhile not ready to grant it my entire trust, there is amazement and unease. Meanwhile they debate on AI becoming conscious in near future. Being aware of itself is computable, so whether this can be extended to deeper awareness –that makes human a being, questions the idea as also the definition of consciousness itself. So we have Penrose and Hinton firmly placed on extreme end of spectrum. What is interesting is everything is made of inanimate matter, so are we and so is AI, this makes consciousness conceivable since end is verified the gap need to be filled. Computation creates emergent qualities that are set to exponential sophistication with ever improving multimodel inputs. Whether it will become like humans (to define consciousness), i.e. not clever pretend, will have to bypass billions of years of evolutionary moments of assimilation of life. Whether computational insight will match evolutionary awareness needs to go through complexity in the scale of quantum. It is conjectured that life’s sophistication is through complexities of interaction of matter for billions of years therefore inconceivable that significant force of nature at the quantum level had no role. Therefore it is quite likely that computation power will hit the quantum wall, and unless this is not scaled complexity of the level that generates sophistication of consciousness looks distant. Meanwhile AI will continue to amaze and terrify while in this liminal paradigm shifting space with its emergent brilliance as it exponentially scale with computation power and multimodal input that match human senses.
