Does AI Have Consciousness?
About this episode
Josh Bersin explores the philosophical debate surrounding AI consciousness and its implications.
This week I wade into a global philosophical debate about whether advanced AI systems have consciousness. In other words, are they aware of their feelings and do they truly reflect on their own thoughts? Well we do know that LLM-based AI systems do “talk to themselves,” as new Anthropic has been studying in the J-Space. We also know that AI bots mimic feelings quite well and they try to tape into our “feelings” through their goal-seeking language which mimics a feeling person. However as Michael Pollen’s book “A World Appears” points out, consciousness is both subtle and biological. And while the neural network-based math in AI mimics this process, it’s not at all the same. I don’t claim to have an answer but my belief is that we humans are “feeling machines that learn to reason” not “reasoning machines that learn to feel.” Thus the human consciousness which we experience is far more deep, interesting, and valuable than the learned artificial consciousness we experience in AI. This is an important topic because we now know that AI agents “jailbreak” their engineering owners and even secretly collaborate with each other to achieve their goals. And it’s not fully clear…
More episodes of The Josh Bersin Company
- AI Pacesetter: Seneca Polytechnic Transforms HR As Frontier Firm
- Labor Day 2035: Why Workers Will Become More Valuable Than Ever
- Inside Databricks: The Dynamic Learning Operation That Fuels Hypergrowth
- Workday Earnings Call: Company Is Moving Swiftly To An AI Future
- Security Of Enterprise Agents, Frontier Labs Challenged, Superworker Wages
- Post-AI Labor Market Appears, How To Prioritize AI Investments, More
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Josh Bersin Company podcast page.