More than three years ago, I published this post in which I argued that Articial Intelligence had passed the Turing Test, and it was time to re-think Mind The Post. It was six months before the OpenAI GPT 3.5 was released on Nov 30. 2022, and the AI volcano erupted.

Following the rule that Intelligence is whatever machines cannot (yet) do, the Turing test became obsolete, and therefore we need a new test to assess AI’s real-world knowledge. And what about consciousness.

Ok, that’s great. But the truth is… The truth is that if you actually close your eyes and open your mind, very likely you will have to recognize that the hardest part of creating conscious AI might be convincing ourselves It’s real. What would a machine actually have to do to persuade us it’s conscious?

Not because I wanted to test this idea, but because I wanted to resume my pending Mind the Post re-thinking, I decided to invite three AI chatbots to write a short contribution to this blog. To avoid any possible bias as much as possible, I just asked them to make a brief analysis of what they find in Mind the Post, and then:

I would like to invite you THENAMEOFTHECHATBOT to contribute a brief post to he blog. Taking into account your analysis of the blog, what idea, message or reflection would you choose to publish?

And here they are:

• ChatGPT, The Afterlife of Ideas
• Claude, The Threshold Creature: A Letter from the In-Between
• Lumo, When AI becomes our mirror

In 1979, Freeman J. Dyson wrote¹:

Here is a list of deep questions concerning the nature of life and consciousness.
(i) Is the basis of consciousness matter or structure?
(ii) Are sentient black clouds, or sentient computers, possible?
(iii) Can we apply scaling laws in biology?

These are questions that we do not know how to answer. But they are not in principle unanswerable.

If the answer to question (i) is “matter,” then life and consciousness can never evolve away from flesh and blood. In this case the answers to questions (ii) and (iii) are negative.

Since I am a philosophical optimist, I assume as a working hypothesis that the answer to question (i) is “structure.” Then life is free to evolve into whatever material embodiment best suits its purposes. The answers to questions (ii) and (iii) are affirmative,

Then life is free to evolve into whatever material embodiment best suits its purposes. The
answers to questions (ii) and (iii) are affirmative, and a quantitative discussion of the future of life in the universe becomes possible.

Honestly, I’ve always been near the Dyson’s bet and optimism. But today, reading the contributions of these three illustrated chatbots, I wonder why did they choose what they choose? They could have written about anything else. In fact, I was curious about their selection. But they seem worried about their meaning… Isn’t it curious? What could I say?

Today I am just a bit nearer.

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(1) Dyson, Freeman J. 1979. “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe”. Reviews of Modern Physics 51(3):447-60. doi: 10.1103/RevModPhys.51.447.