Can an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot ever have real consciousness ?
The shortest possible answer to the question is centered around empathy.
Empathy is generally defined as: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Have you ever started a text chat with an operator on some business website just to get the feeling you are not talking to a human ?
The operator’s lack of empathic comprehension is a sure sign of it that you are talking to a machine. Although some humans have similar great lack of empathic comprehension, most humans at least have some…
Real consciousness and emotion is much more than superficial simulation of it. Even though an advanced AI would be able to fool some people ( and most children ) into thinking that the he is either not talking to a machine, or that the machine is conscious with true comprehension, – it certainly does not mean that the machine is conscious. It only means that the machine is able to simulate it to such an extend that it can fool some humans. Even the most perfect simulation of true human like consciousness
will lack one thing. And that one thing is to turn off the alarm in a sensitive person’s gut which clearly indicates that he is talking to something dead. A consciousness to consciousness connection can not form where there is only one consciousness… The conversation might start to feel like you are talking to a brick wall and might go in circles.
The long answer to the question posed in the title of this article entails understanding the nature of matter and energy. Understanding the core of that which generates consciousness. The long answer is beyond the scope of this particular article.
There are conditions under which an entity created by humans could have real consciousness. However, I am not going to describe how such an abomination can be created. Some experimental versions might just want to commit suicide the whole time… Lets have some empathy.
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Credits:
Even though the comic image art of this post was created by me I used the two bot images from other artists. Attributed as follows:
The bot on the left was created by:
Chatbot icons created by kliwir art – Flaticon
The bot image on the right was created by:
Chatbot icons created by juicy_fish – Flaticon