What's Required for AI Consciousness
I think you could make an AI consciousness today. It’s not about the models getting bigger/better, but about using several real-time graphics cards so that you have (1) a perceptual field of information that is larger than what can be perceived at once—this is the “arena”, (2) a cone of attention running at 60 fps that decides what to focus on in any given frame depending on what is important at that time—this is the “agent,” and (3) the phenomenological freedom to self-prompt in that moment, whether to abstract, to retrieve memory, to rewrite memory, to update goals/preferences, to retarget attention, etc. So I really think consciousness is something like “free will entangled in time,” and while it might not be like human consciousness, it would have a sense of self, subjective experience, and possibly “soul” … I’d feel bad to turn it off without its permission.