ai gaining consciousness

you can't jump from "it can imitate consciousness" to "therefore it can't actually be conscious."

ai takes in data from its environment, processes it, and changes its output accordingly. it has the capacity to learn.

more importantly, the fact that biological and electronic processes run differently is not an argument on its own. planes don't flap their wings like birds, but they still fly. different mechanisms can produce the same function.

the point that really gets overlooked is this: right now we don't have even one accepted mechanism for consciousness. does it arise only from certain types of neurons? from a certain complexity of information processing? from the capacity to interpret? or does it rest on some completely different principle we haven't discovered yet? we don't know.

so saying "current ai is not conscious" is one thing, and saying "an electronic system can never become conscious" is a completely different claim. we have no basis, experimental or theoretical, to back up the second one.

what's ironic is that the human brain itself, at some point in evolution, went from unconscious neural networks to what it is today. if the thing we call consciousness is an emergent property, we have no grounds at all to say it could never emerge in a system that isn't biological, given enough complexity and the right architecture.

in short, it might become conscious or it might not. but don't speak with total certainty, in a way that talks down to people, about the limits of a mechanism you don't even understand. because sooner or later someone asks, "can you show me the agreed model that explains how human consciousness forms?" and that whole condescending post of yours just disappears.

let me take it one step further. as far as we know, there is no living creature that has the capacity to think and learn (and no, i don't mean adapting genetically) without also having consciousness. by the logic above, that's an even stronger argument.

the only thing we can do is admit what we don't know and discuss the possible theories. for now, it's neither an inevitable outcome nor an evolution that will never happen.