We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
They’re no more intelligent than an AC/DC converter
The problem is in the definition of intelligence.
To me, intelligence is simply problem-solving ability. It does not necessarily imply consciousness, having self-awareness or anything like that. A simple calculator is already displaying intelligence, even if limited to a very narrow situational set of problems, in the sense that it can resolve mathematical questions.
That doesn't mean the calculator is self aware.. it just means it can resolve problems. Biological systems can also resolve problems without necessarily being aware of what they are doing.. does the fungus actually knows it's solving a maze the scientists prepared for it when it just expands following what is preprogrammed by its biological instincts determined by natural selection? Do the ants really know what they are doing when they find the shortest path just by instinctively following a scent of pheromones left by other ants?
Knowing exactly what causes consciousness is an entirely different problem.. and it's one that has not been resolved by any scientist or philosopher in a satisfactory manner. So we simply do not know that.