I think it's absolutely possible
that we can have conscious robots, conscious AIs.
I don't think it's desirable.
I think we can learn what we wanna learn,
which is a lot about the nature of human consciousness
with simpler models, smart tools, yes,
but we don't need artificial colleagues,
because if we really succeeded,
then they would be precisely as autonomous as we are,
and we're very dangerous.
And unless we could be sure
that they would have the same opportunities
for learning how to behave,
and what to value in culture,
it would be reckless for us to give them that much autonomy.
Given that I'm pessimistic
about the safety of conscious AIs,
I'm also optimistic about the difficulty of getting it.
I don't think we're anywhere close.
I don't think it's coming
in 10 years, or 20 years, or 50 years,
and I don't think that the wonderful successes
of deep learning, machine learning,
the latest wave of enthusiasm in AI,
that's giving us some great fabrics,
but it's not giving us
the architectures of conscious agency.
Time and memory are the basis of agency, of human life.
Learning depends on being able
to extract information from your past
and apply it in the future.
All of life is a matter of exploiting the past
to anticipate the presence of the future,
and the sense of the passage of time
is a byproduct of our agency,
of the fact that we're evolved to take care of ourselves,
to fend off the inexorable demands
of the second law of thermodynamics
that say that we're gonna
get ground down to dust eventually.
So time matters for us
a way it doesn't matter for planets,
or mountains, or the ocean.
It matters for living things 'cause their time is limited.
Well, one of the hardest lessons to accept
is that people that don't agree with you
are not flaming idiots.
There's something behind what they think
that if you don't understand,
you're not going to be able to communicate.
However gratifying, however satisfying it may be
to your sense of righteousness and order,
you can't beat people over the head with a logic stick
and get them to change their minds.
You have to meet them on their own ground,
and it's hard work, and it often doesn't work,
but we just have to keep trying.
Belief is not a voluntary act.
If I offered you a hundred dollars
to believe that snow was blue, you couldn't.
No way to collect that money.
You could pretend.
Beliefs are established by our experience,
and by our interaction with the world,
and they can be very hard to dislodge,
and it takes a lot of effort to examine and reconsider,
and particularly to abandon opinions,
convictions that you've had
when you learn that there's alternatives.
And I think that one of the hardest tasks
a human mind can face
is reserving judgment about a conviction
that has always seemed to you obvious,
and thinking about how maybe that might not be right.
Well, I think one of the things that I've learned,
and have made it a big part of my practice as a philosopher,
is you almost never see somebody change their mind
because they've been given a formal argument
with premises and a logical conclusion,
and it's been just beaten into them.
You know, accept this conclusion or die.
That doesn't work.
You have to enliven the imagination.
You have to sometimes even trick,
cajole, seduce people into seeing things in a different way,
inverting their view in some way.
I think philosophy is not so much of science as an art,
and it's the art of imagination instruction, in a way.
I think one of the things I've learned
is that when somebody in a class or in an audience
says, "This may be a dumb question,"
but it's usually the best question.
The experts seldom ask really surprising questions.
The undergraduates are great at asking good questions.
In fact, one of my sort of maxims over the years
is that if you're not teaching undergraduates in philosophy,
you're going to get inbred and artifactual.
Undergraduates, bold as brass, they ask the good questions.
And if you can't explain what you're doing
to bright undergraduates,
then you don't know what you're doing.