Gigaom AI Minute – May 8

Transcript

We recently surveyed Gigaom's audience about their views on artificial intelligence. Our audience is primarily made up of business people that have an interest in technology and I would like to use the next several AI minutes to explore the answers.

The eighth question we asked was a follow up to the question, "Is consciousness uniquely human?" And that is, "Can computers be conscious?"

The number of people who said "yes," was 20%, the number of people who said "no", was 35%--almost 2-to-1--and the number of people who said, "I don't know," was 45%, almost half of everybody said, they don't know. Now, the view that the universe is a completely mechanistic system--that we're all here as a series of events that led from the Big Bang to here, that life evolved on its own on this planet without any intervention--that whole narrative of understanding the universe is held by about 18.5% of the people in the United States. It's interesting that the number of people who say, "Computers can become conscious," is roughly the same number. Because to believe that computers can become conscious, it is a mechanistic view that you can build a machine, and the machine would achieve consciousness and ergo people are machines as well, and we can achieve consciousness, so therefore machines can. But it's interesting that a lot of people still don't have an opinion on the question, half of the people say, "I don't know if machines can ever be conscious."