Gigaom AI Minute – November 7

Transcript

When it comes to building a general intelligence there are three concepts we have to grapple with. The mind, the brain, and consciousness. We've already covered the mind and the brain. Now let's turn to consciousness. What exactly is it?

There's a common belief that we don't know what consciousness is. This isn't true. We know exactly what it is, we just don't know how it comes about. Consciousness is the experience of what are called "qualia." It's the difference between knowing the temperature of something and feeling heat. Humans can feel, we can sense, we can feel heat, we can feel pain, but it's unclear how a machine would be able to do that. A machine can detect temperature, it can detect damage.

Why is consciousness important? Human intelligence may be deeply rooted in the fact that we are conscious. It is our consciousness, for instance, that gives us the ability to switch focus. It is our consciousness that gives us the ability to learn from our environment in a completely different way. Consciousness is this great mystery of how it comes about. It may be no coincidence that the only truly general intelligent thing that we know of in the universe, namely humans, is also one of the only things, probably, that has this distinctive characteristic of consciousness. So it may be that before we can build an artificial general intelligence we have to understand what consciousness is and how to duplicate it mechanically, even if that's possible.