Many experts think conscious AI is an inevitability. Neuroscientist Anil Seth thinks they’re wrong.

Many experts think that conscious AI is possible. I think they're wrong. I want to tell you why and why this matters so much. So, I've been studying brains, minds, and consciousness for nearly 30 years. We know we're conscious and we like to think that we're intelligent. So, we think the two go together, but consciousness and intelligence are different things. Intelligence is all about doing. It's solving a crossword puzzle, assembling some furniture, navigating a tricky family situation. Consciousness, on the other hand, it's all about feeling and being. It's the difference between normal wakeful awareness and the oblivion of general anesthesia. It's the bitter tang of coffee. It's the warmth of a log fire. The joy of seeing a loved one. Just because consciousness and intelligence go together in us does not mean that they go together in general. The assumption that they do, well, that's a reflection of our own psychology, not an insight into the nature of reality. Artificial intelligence is computer software. It is not a living mind. It might give the impression of being conscious, but it is vanishingly unlikely that it actually is. Will a robot ever gaze at a sunset and experience the beautiful colors, the reds and the oranges? Will it feel a sense of beauty or a rush of joy? Or will computers, however smart they get, always remain dark on the inside? Always an object and never a subject. So, let's not sell our minds so easily to our machine creations. If we do, we not only overestimate them, we underestimate ourselves.