By Toni Sims
Ms. Sims is a researcher at the Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy at New York University.
At a cozy bar in Manhattan, I recently had a first date with a software engineer who works for one of the big technology companies. Given my interest in artificial intelligence, I thought we might hit it off. But when I told him that I work on moral problems related to A.I., including the possibility that it might become conscious, he barely suppressed a laugh.
There’s no way A.I. could be conscious, he declared. Then he asked, incredulously, if I even knew how large language models work.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. Though my research requires a fairly detailed understanding of L.L.M.s, no one, not even their designers, entirely knows how L.L.M.s work. In retrospect, I should have asked my date if he understood how consciousness works. Because while he seemed to think that I had an inflated sense of A.I. capabilities, I wonder whether he has an inflated sense of what consciousness requires.
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