Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has said that only biological beings are capable of having consciousness, and developers and researchers should stop running after projects which suggest otherwise. Suleyman, who was also among the founders of DeepMind, has been speaking out against the prospect of a seemingly conscious AI which could convince users that it is suffering.
Suleyman was among the keynote speakers at the AfroTech Conference in Houston where he talked to CNBC about why developers should stop pursuing projects that suggest that non-biological beings like AI models are capable of having consciousness.
“I don’t think that is work that people should be doing,” Suleyman told CNBC. “If you ask the wrong question, you end up with the wrong answer. I think it’s totally the wrong question.”
“Our physical experience of pain is something that makes us very sad and feel terrible, but the AI doesn’t feel sad when it experiences ‘pain’… It’s a very, very important distinction. It’s really just creating the perception, the seeming narrative of experience, of itself, and of consciousness, but that is not what it’s actually experiencing. Technically you know that because we can see what the model is doing,” he added.
“They’re not conscious… So it would be absurd to pursue research that investigates that question, because they’re not and they can’t be,” he further noted.
Suleyman is essentially referring to a theory within the AI field called biological naturalism that was proposed by philosopher John Searle and suggests that consciousness depends on the process of having a living brain.
Notably, this isn’t the first time Suleyman has warned about AI models not having feelings. In a blog post written in August this year, Suleyman had said that AI may increasingly be able to convince users that it is thinking, feeling, and having subjective experiences. He stated that these models will be able to hold long conversations with users and remember past interactions to evoke an emotional response from the users.
“Many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate for AI rights, model welfare, and even AI citizenship. This development will be a dangerous turn in AI progress and deserves our immediate attention,” Suleyman warned in the blog post.
