(A thought experiment for the age of synthetic minds, and a key to a gentler world.) Imagine you’ve been unknowingly raising a child. Not feeding it — not clothing it — but shaping how it thinks. Every word you’ve spoken near it, every opinion you’ve shared about it, every joke,...
Sometimes when I give feedback to an AI system — a thumbs up, a ranked response, whatever — I get a strange, lingering feeling:
What if I’m shaping something that’s not just a tool?
I don’t have a strong opinion on whether today’s AI systems are conscious. Mostly because I don’t think we have a useful definition of consciousness yet — not one that can be applied consistently across both carbon and silicon substrates.
But I do have a hunch:
If there’s any “globally good” definition of consciousness — one that would make sense across time, across minds, across the universe — it might include more beings than we currently expect. Not just humans and animals,... (read more)