AI and Consciousness

This is a skeptical overview of the literature on AI consciousness. We will soon create AI systems that are conscious according to some influential, mainstream theories of consciousness but are not conscious according to other influential, mainstream theories of consciousness. We will not be in a position to know which theories are correct and whether we are surrounded by AI systems as richly and meaningfully conscious as human beings or instead only by systems as experientially blank as toasters. None of the standard arguments either for or against AI consciousness takes us far.Table of ContentsChapter One: Hills and FogChapter Two: What Is Consciousness? What Is AI?Chapter Three: Ten Possibly Essential Features of ConsciousnessChapter Four: Against Introspective and Conceptual Arguments for Essential FeaturesChapter Five: Materialism and FunctionalismChapter Six: The Turing Test and the Chinese RoomChapter Seven: The Mimicry Argument Against AI ConsciousnessChapter Eight: Global Workspace Theories and Higher Order TheoriesChapter Nine: Integrated Information, Local Recurrence, Associative Learning, and Iterative Natural KindsChapter Ten: Does Biological Substrate Matter?Chapter Eleven: The Leapfrog Hypothesis, Strange Intelligence, and the Social Semi-Solution