thank you for finding time to come to this talk
this talk
this talk um I'm Ava Scott I'm a PhD student at
University College London and I'm going
to be talking to you about user
perceptions of machine consciousness
when it comes to the prospect of machine
Consciousness I expect a lot of you will
have healthy amounts of both skepticism
and speculation
and speculation a quick disclaimer this presentation
does not attempt to answer whether
machine Consciousness could exist the
nature of Consciousness has been debated
by philosophers and spiritual leaders
for millennia
for millennia while Consciousness was separated from
material matter by Descartes of the 17th
century more recently neuroscientists
have tried to bring Consciousness back
into the empirical material Realm by
using brain Imaging to measure its
neural correlates
neural correlates however as machines increasingly able to
emulate lifelike and even human-like
Behavior Technologies such as Alexa
Roomba and chat GPT have been mentioned
in the discussion of Consciousness
encouraging computer science to enter
the debate however interestingly human
computer interaction has had little to
say on machine Consciousness so far
in this paper we argue that people's perceptions of machine Consciousness is
more important to HCI than the actual
existence of machine consciousness we
know that people build mental models of
computer outputs that they don't
understand it is hdi's role to
understand and work with these
conceptualizations
conceptualizations while there has been extensive work on
perceptions of anthropomorphism in
robots and perceived agency in digital
objects there has not yet been an
explicit account of perceptions of
Consciousness and machines so we set out
to fill this Gap
to kick-start this inquiry we surveyed 100 people working as participants on
mturk the regional distribution covered
the US the UK Europe and Australia we
required all of our participants to be
fluent in English
is completely Anonymous allowing
participants to be as honest as possible
about their perceptions of Consciousness
in machines
in machines however mtep participants may share some
characteristics in their knowledge of
machines and computers so future work
should take these questions outside of
an online survey
we had two main research questions
the first is whether people actually
perceive machine Consciousness in
contemporary Technologies and if so to
what degree
what degree after this we will measure the
narratives concerns and speculations but
first we need to actually check if
people do perceive machine consciousness
the features of particular systems are
likely to influence the perceptions of
Consciousness in them so it's important
to include a variety of Technologies as
research probes
research probes we chose three technologies that have
all been discussed previously in the
Consciousness literature and the HCI
literature Alexa a vacuum robot
and GPT
we introduce participants to these Technologies using videos where they
display varying levels of interactivity
anthropomorphism language skills and
movement
movement
movement for example while the robot vacuum
cleaner can move independently the Alexa
speaker and gpt3 can use language and
Converse
Converse
Converse while gpt3 interacts via a text
interface Alexa uses a voice interface
this diversity of features allows us to
explore whether Consciousness is
perceptible across systems with a wide
range of functionalities and traits
the systems also vary in the level of
public familiarity
public familiarity however we measured this and we found
that it had no significant effect on the
perception of consciousness
inspired by the phrasing in Thomas
Nagel's famous paper we asked
participants if they thought it felt
like something to be that technology
this phrasing gets close to a colloquial
understanding of phenomenal experience
this is the distribution of our results
these are interesting because we see most of our answers surrounding the
extremes while the majority of people
felt that the the technology was
definitely not conscious the second most
common answer was it definitely was
conscious
conscious
conscious then wanted to see how participants
would quantify the concept of
Consciousness so they we asked them to
rate the technology on a scale
if the participant for the technology
was definitely not conscious they would
rate it as a zero or a one on the scale
if they thought the technology was
definitely conscious they would rate it
as a 10 on the scale
surprisingly we found that the majority of people perceived some degree of
Consciousness in each of these systems
this is not what we expected however we
did also find that many people do not
perceive any Consciousness at all
so to answer our first research question
some people do perceive Consciousness in
machines but some don't
it seems that both camps of speculation
and denial will have a significant
number of proponents a challenge for HCI
researchers will be to put aside their
own perspective and engage with the
distribution of all perspectives
however this meta perspective might hold
us might make us unpopular with both
sides who are likely to hold their
beliefs with moral conviction
by investigating this objectively one
side could see that think that we are
legitimizing the beliefs of the
alternative side
alternative side to understand the implications of this
approach we will need to collaborate
with philosophers and ethicists to
better understand the moral and ethical
parameters of these alternative beliefs
part of this inquiry will be
understanding how either side informs
and justifies their opposing positions
so we set out to do this
our second research question
wanted to explore the narrative's
concerns and speculations that people
currently associate with machine
consciousness
consciousness we use sentence completion tasks which
ask participants to complete a given
phrase it's a bit like prompt
engineering
engineering sentence completion tasks facilitate
more flexible responses than questions
with multiple choice answers but also
guide the respondent towards a more
appropriate concept than a completely
open-ended question
open-ended question the three prompts above explore the
various ways in which the word conscious
or Consciousness could be used what is
one's own Consciousness like what could
the word conscious mean by itself
we can see that before machines even
enter the picture their answers are
complex and varied 56 participants
mentioned awareness and 12 others
mentioned reactivity
mentioned reactivity 14 participants were mentioned emotions
while several others mentioned morality
principles and taking responsibility
we also asked our participants to directly compare human consciousness
with machine consciousness
some rejected the question saying it was
impossible unbelievable or the product
of deception
of deception other participants entertain the
questions
questions
questions some saying that machine Consciousness
could be more advanced or useful or some
would saying that it would be
legitimately similar to human
consciousness
consciousness nine participants thought that machine
Consciousness would be lesser than
humans in some way
and many thought that it would be
controlled by humans or by the computer
chip Computing chip that it was embedded
in
in
in finally we then asked them to consider
that what their reactions would be to an
example technology if it hypothetically
appeared conscious
appeared conscious here we got the widest range of answers
exploring the implications for the
Technology's performance as well as for
social interactions and more existential
concerns
concerns
concerns we also had people who would still deny
the question even when we asked them to
be hypothetical
be hypothetical using these quantitative findings and
our qualitative speculations we
extracted Dynamic tensions that could
characterize the contradictions and
conflations in people's understanding of
consciousness
consciousness an example of one of these Dynamic
tensions is the dependence and
independent independence of machines on
humans
humans
humans many of our respondents Associated
Consciousness with the ability to think
and make decisions for oneself or take
responsibility for one's actions
however machines are often perceived as
dependent on humans or coding and
therefore submissive to their desires
this leads to an interesting tension
if machines appear to follow the
instructions of a developer or a human
is this a reason to deny its
Consciousness or instead to perceive it
as a Consciousness being restrained or
held back by a developer
there is also an interesting interaction
with the abstract statistical networks
underlying much artificial intelligence
these neural networks may have been
developed by a human but the output is
generated through impenetrable
statistical associations that lack
explainability to humans these outputs
could be perceived as emerging from an
artificial intelligence which is
independent of human instruction
whether you are a skeptic or a
Speculator the perception of machine
Consciousness raises some urgent
research challenges for HCI
one major research challenge is
understanding if and how a concept of
machine Consciousness manifests around
the world
the world
the world existing challenges in HCI will be
reinvigorated by a notion of machine
Consciousness how does the perception of
machine Consciousness influence
negotiations of status and hierarchy
between machines and humans
will it adds another layer of legitimacy
or complexity to the existing emotional
relationships between users and their
computers
computers
computers finally interaction designers and
Scholars hold a lot of responsibility
over the perception of Consciousness in
a machine interface already the
developers of gpt4 and other chatbots
have been accused of denying all
lobotomizing their machines by
restricting their machine The Machine's
ability to react in particular ways
there's something of the Catch-22 here
as designers we have to anticipate the
implications of machines being perceived
as conscious but we may also face the
blame when they are not perceived as
such
we must build an authority in what causes people to machine perceive
machines as conscious and the effects
this will have on interaction
by building this voice we can engage
with other experts in an emerging
discourse or machine consciousness
together we should try and put aside our
own perceptions and work to realize the
importance of HCI in an era of machine
Consciousness whether that is real
perceived or denied
thank you for listening