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Tallis in Wonderland

The Fantasy of Conscious Machines

Raymond Tallis says talk of ‘artificial intelligence’ is neither intelligent nor indeed, intelligible.

Being bald means that you can’t tear your hair out in lumps. Consequently, I have to find other ways of expressing exasperation. One such is through a column inflicted on the readers of Philosophy Now (who may justly feel they deserve better). And the trigger? Yet another wild and philosophically ill-informed claim from the artificial intelligentsia that conscious machines are, or soon will be, among us.

An engineer at Google recently attracted international attention by claiming that the company’s chatbot development system – Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) – had shown the signs of sentience by its seemingly thoughtful and self-reflexive answer to being questioned as to what it was afraid of.

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