Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I agree that the current technology isn’t going to produce self-awareness, but it seems to me there’s some chance in the next couple of hundred years we’ll have computers that are both as smart as humans — maybe more so — and that there’s at least a good reason to think that they might have conscious experiences the way that humans do. Ultimately, once we can make those intelligences quite small, it would be possible to send them to other solar systems and then they can take actions. But if you think materials really matter, and I do, it could be self-aware entities have to be biological in some sense, and that thus, they’re going to be relatively fragile. We know how to build more human beings. It’s even a pretty fun technology, doesn’t cost that much. Self-aware AI is always competing against that. The notion that you have human-like beings augmented, cyborgs, I think, will outcompete the notion of robots in the Isaac Asimov sense that they walk like a robot, but they are self-aware and have all the smarts of AI. I would be surprised by that. It seems like you were saying just a minute ago that humans are conscious because there’re computers. So it seems like it should be, in principle, possible, but in as much as we can do computations on some other system, don’t you think there’s a good chance that they would feel something?…

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