. . . I think a lot of people are fooled by the gimmicks of modern AI. Earlier computers were already very good at linear step-by-step (arithmetical-logical) computations. Modern computers have become better at non-linear (statistical-probabilistic) computing. The increasing processing speed and memory has helped. And this is allowing modern AI to distinguish between patterns, often at around human levels of accuracy. This does not mean though that these AI are conscious. These AI may be able to distinguish between patterns, but it does not mean that they experience or understand them. Human beings do. We have meanings attached to those patterns.
If an AI of
machine learning caliber (especially equipped in that area with developing its own commonsense routines and principles) can identify patterns, classify them, and relate them to other patterns and concepts in memory... Then that takes care of the understanding part.
The older "meaning" issues revolving around a
symbol grounding problem can be remedied by giving the AI external environment information via cameras, microphones, haptic sensors, etc. And augmenting it with the capacity to analyze that data in such detail (in conjunction with manipulating wholes as needed) that it can infer/discern shapes and other characteristics in at least a p-zombie like processing fashion (non-phenomenal consciousness).
A camera may be able to distinguish between red and blue, but it does not mean that it experiences or perceives red or blue. We humans do.(And I suspect most creatures in the animal kingdom do, but individual experience of colours may vary.) "Qualia", subjective experience, perception, understanding, feelings or emotions - these are some of the keywords. Unless an entity has these, it cannot be called conscious, no matter how well it mimics another conscious entity.
Consciousness is an umbrella concept subsuming a variety of items, of which phenomenal activity ("showing forth", not happening invisibly) is just one member. The latter can be shucked and there are still other features that can qualify _X_ as being conscious (albeit of a non-phenomenal or p-zombie like type). Since one can't access the private manifestations which another human supposedly has, we are judging that other things are conscious on the basis of outward signs, behavior, and measurements anyway (including verbal reports if the organism or apparatus is such a communicator).
However, skepticism (in the experience context) is warranted with regard to smart machines since engineers haven't deliberately designed them to generate subjective manifestations (visual, auditory, tactile, etc). The planners could not intentionally do so even if they desired to since it is not known what sets of procedures and structural relationships conjure phenomenal events. The latter "brute emergence" (conjure) is applicable if no already existing science-recognized precursors are posited for complex experiences to be built-up from. (In contrast to non-tested fringe stuff that's simply speculative, which due to that current status accordingly does not deeply answer or solve anything, either).
The "hard problem of consciousness" should instead be called "the problem of manifestation". Since repeatedly using the word "consciousness" grants flexibility to those uncomfortable with or embarrassed by the lack of deep explanation to wander off into other items and affairs subsumed under the broad term, so as to thereby avoid addressing it or staying on track (also facilitating "bait and switch"). Even qualiophiles detour from the actual problem via they and their opponents fixating on what is actually just more content of manifestation.
Qualia are elemental content recruited by the system as building-blocks to represent objects and circumstances with complicated properties and structural details. Whereas the problem of "manifestation" is directly confronting how there can be something present at all. The conventional nature of the non-conscious universe in general, from subatomic to macroscopic, is that it lacks a showing of itself as anything whatsoever. It is the "not even nothingness" of being dead that people who do not believe in an afterlife expect (extinctivism). Panpsychism would differ with respect to matter being absent to itself, but panpsychism is not a mainstream view nor apparently testable, at least for the time being. It has the ridicule challenge to overcome as well.
