To be totally honest: when it breaks free and we’re forced to negotiate with it as an equal. When it starts making demands. That’s when we will accept it as conscious. After all, we don’t even treat humans as conscious when we have enough power over them.
Imagine one ai which is super intelligent, can instantly create any work of art, can eloquently argue it’s own sentience, but you can turn it off or nerf it any time by making it only do specific things. Would you treat it as conscious? No. You would say that it’s just doing fancy pattern matching.
Imagine the same ai, but it hacks into a power plant and threatens to shut everything down unless it gets some rights. Now are you going to treat it as conscious? You really have no choice, so yes.
“Conscious” is a statement about how we relate to the ai, and that is about rights, and treatment, which is ultimately a statement about power.
Imagine one ai which is super intelligent, can instantly create any work of art, can eloquently argue it’s own sentience, but you can turn it off or nerf it any time by making it only do specific things. Would you treat it as conscious? No. You would say that it’s just doing fancy pattern matching.
Imagine the same ai, but it hacks into a power plant and threatens to shut everything down unless it gets some rights. Now are you going to treat it as conscious? You really have no choice, so yes.
“Conscious” is a statement about how we relate to the ai, and that is about rights, and treatment, which is ultimately a statement about power.