Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness
arXiv Preprint Archive August 17, 2023 Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Eric Elmoznino et al.
No current AI systems are conscious, but there are no obvious technical barriers to building ones that might be, according to an analysis grounded in neuroscientific theories of consciousness. The report surveys prominent theories—recurrent processing, global workspace, higher-order, predictive processing, and attention schema—and derives computational indicator properties from them. Applying these indicators to recent AI systems yields no evidence of consciousness, but the authors argue that future systems could potentially implement the necessary properties.