Why AI Isn’t Going to Become Conscious | Anil Seth | TED

Name: Why AI Isn’t Going to Become Conscious | Anil Seth | TED
Duration: 14 min 57 s
Description: We see consciousness in AI the same way we see faces in clouds, says neuroscientist Anil Seth. He explores the all-too-human tendency to project inner life o...

14:57Added Aug 30, 2026

We see consciousness in AI the same way we see faces in clouds, says neuroscientist Anil Seth. He explores the all-too-human tendency to project inner life o...

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Contributed by 刘嘉琪

Transcript

00:04So for centuries,
00:05people have fantasized about playing God
00:08by creating artificial versions of ourselves.
00:11From Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"
00:14to Hal in Stanley Kubrick's "2001"
00:16and Ava in Alex Garland's "Ex Machina,"
00:19this is a dream reinvented with every breaking wave of technology,
00:23and with AI, the wave is a big one.
00:25The AI we have is already smart, at least in some ways.
00:29But could it ever be conscious?
00:33Will a robot ever gaze at a sunset and experience the beautiful colors,
00:37the reds and the oranges?
00:38Will it feel a sense of beauty or a rush of joy?
00:43Or will computers, however smart they get,
00:46always remain dark on the inside,
00:50always an object and never a subject?
00:54Whether AI can be conscious is one of the most consequential questions
00:59we face in our time.
01:01If computers can be conscious or sentient or aware,
01:03we'd be entering a new era in human history.
01:06We'd have new entities that have their own inner lives,
01:10new inventions that matter for their own sakes
01:13and not only for their effects on us.
01:16Conscious AI might suffer the click of a mouse,
01:19perhaps in ways we wouldn't even recognize.
01:22And if silicon can be sentient,
01:24then maybe our messy flesh-and-blood bodies
01:27will soon be superseded by machines that never age
01:31and cannot die.
01:34Now over the last few years,
01:35progress in AI has been simply astonishing.
01:38And who knows what's around the corner.
01:40Many experts think that conscious AI is possible.
01:45Quite a few think it's inevitable, and some, some think it's here already.
01:50I think they're wrong.
01:51I want to tell you why and why this matters so much.
01:55So I've been studying brains, minds and consciousness for nearly 30 years,
01:59and one thing I've learned is that to answer the question,
02:02"can AI be conscious,"
02:04we need to start by looking within ourselves
02:06at the makeup of our own human minds.
02:09Now we humans, we tend to see the world in our own terms.
02:12We know we’re conscious, and we like to think that we’re intelligent.
02:16So we think the two go together.
02:19And this is why some people think
02:21that consciousness might just glimmer into existence
02:24as AI gets smarter and smarter.
02:27But consciousness and intelligence are different things.
02:30Intelligence is all about doing.
02:32It's solving a crossword puzzle,
02:34assembling some furniture, navigating a tricky family situation.
02:38Consciousness, on the other hand, it's all about feeling and being.
02:43It's the difference between normal, wakeful awareness
02:46and the oblivion of general anesthesia.
02:49It's the bitter tang of coffee,
02:51it's the warmth of a log fire.
02:53The joy of seeing a loved one.
02:56Just because consciousness and intelligence go together in us
03:00does not mean that they go together in general.
03:03The assumption that they do,
03:05well, that's a reflection of our own psychology,
03:07not an insight into the nature of reality.
03:12Take language models like Claude or GPT,
03:15trained on vast quantities of written texts.
03:18They reflect back to us an image of ourselves,
03:20of our collective, digitized past.
03:23We talk about ourselves endlessly,
03:25and so do they.
03:27We wonder about consciousness and the meaning of it all.
03:31And so, it seems, do they.
03:33But language models are not conscious.
03:37They simulate consciousness.
03:38We project consciousness into them
03:41in the same way we might project faces into clouds,
03:45or even the image of Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun.
03:48I don't know if you can see that.
03:50There she is, Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun.
03:52(Laughter)
03:54We are built to be seduced, like Narcissus, by our own reflections.
03:59And so we see ourselves in our algorithms.
04:03I'm always struck that nobody really worries
04:05whether DeepMind's AlphaFold is conscious.
04:08AlphaFold predicts the structure of proteins
04:10rather than words and sentences,
04:12but under the hood, it's not much different from Claude or GPT,
04:16algorithms running on silicon and trained on vast reservoirs of data.
04:20AlphaFold just doesn't pull our psychological strings in the same way.
04:24So if we think that Claude is conscious, but AlphaFold isn't,
04:28that says more about us than it says about AI.
04:32(Applause)
04:36But how can I be so sure
04:37those systems, like Claude or GPT, aren't conscious?
04:41Well, nothing is for certain when it comes to consciousness,
04:44but the very idea of conscious AI depends on a deeper assumption,
04:48a kind of myth, really.
04:49And this is the myth that the brain is a computer
04:52that just happens to be made of meat rather than metal.
04:56Now consciousness in this story is a special algorithm,
04:59a collection of computations
05:01that just happens to be carried out in the wetware of the brain in us,
05:05but which could equally be carried out in silicon, in AI.
05:10But the computer is just one
05:12in a long line of technological metaphors that we've reached for
05:16when trying to understand the deep complexity of the brain.
05:21One time, the brain was a system of plumbing.
05:25Later, it was a telephone exchange.
05:28And for the last few decades, it's been a computer.
05:30And this most recent metaphor has been extremely powerful.
05:34But it is still a metaphor.
05:37And we will always get into trouble
05:38when we confuse a metaphor with the thing itself.
05:42The map with the territory.
05:45For one thing, in a real brain,
05:47there's no sharp separation between the mindware and the wetware.
05:52Unlike the separation that you get between software and hardware in a computer.
05:57And this really matters because in a computer,
06:00you can describe and understand everything about an algorithm,
06:03whether it's a language model or a word processor,
06:05without worrying about all the silicon shenanigans
06:08going on underneath.
06:09The computation, the algorithm is all that matters.
06:13But for brains,
06:14you just cannot separate what they do from what they are.
06:19And this means that what they do
06:20is unlikely to be a matter of computation of algorithm alone.
06:25Look closely at a brain, at any brain,
06:28and it becomes less and less plausible that all that's going on
06:31is just turning some numbers into other numbers
06:34in this endless dance of zeros and ones.
06:38Yes, there are neural circuits
06:40which exchange signals and may do computation,
06:42or at least something like it.
06:44But there's so much else that escapes the confines of the digital.
06:48Neurotransmitter chemicals course through the brain circuitry,
06:52electromagnetic fields sweep through the cortex like weather systems.
06:57Even a single neuron is such a beautiful biological machine.
07:02A far cry from the simplified, cartoon-like neurons
07:06that power today's AI.
07:09The brain is not, or at least not just, a computer made of meat.
07:14And so consciousness is very unlikely to be a matter of computation alone.
07:19And if this is true, then conscious AI is off the table,
07:23at least for AI as we know it today.
07:26Let me put it another way.
07:28What if we simulated every last detail about the brain
07:32in some massive supercomputer?
07:33Now if the fine details of the brain do matter for consciousness,
07:37well, wouldn't this be enough
07:38for consciousness to happen inside a machine?
07:41Well, a computer simulation of a hurricane does not create real wind.
07:46[A] computer simulation of a black hole doesn’t suck the Earth
07:49into its algorithmic singularity.
07:52Making these simulations more detailed can make them more useful,
07:56but it does not make them any more real.
08:00We can have a simulation of the brain,
08:02and you can make it as detailed as you want.
08:04This might make it more useful,
08:06but it's not going to make it any more conscious.
08:11Now consciousness, has to be said does remain a bit mysterious,
08:14but perhaps one reason for this
08:16is that we've been so constrained by our metaphors,
08:19by the idea that it just has to be some kind of information processing.
08:24After all, if you think the brain literally is a computer,
08:27then what else could it really be?
08:30But once we see the brain more clearly for what it really is,
08:34many new possibilities arise.
08:36And my own view, developed over many years,
08:39is that consciousness is intimately connected to our nature
08:42as living creatures.
08:44Unlike the abstract universe of computation,
08:48life is all about materiality.
08:50Unlike algorithms,
08:51living systems are deeply embedded in flows of energy and matter,
08:56and they continually regenerate their own conditions for existence
09:00and for persistence over time.
09:03I think we can draw a direct line from the molecular furnaces of metabolism,
09:08one billion biochemical reactions in every cell, in every second,
09:13all the way to the neural circuits
09:14that underlie each and every experience that we have,
09:18whether it's the sight of a blue sky or a pang of envy.
09:23Every conscious experience is imbued, however subtly,
09:27with a tinge of aliveness,
09:28with some core relevance for our future survival prospects.
09:32And at the heart of every experience, beneath even emotion, is this simple,
09:37shapeless and formless but fundamental feeling of being alive.
09:43And in this story,
09:44it's life, not computation,
09:47that breathes the fire into the equations of experience.
09:51And if this is right,
09:52then conscious AI will need to be living AI.
09:58Let me bring things together.
10:00First, we're built to see consciousness where it isn't,
10:03thanks to deep-seated psychological biases
10:06that bundle language, intelligence
10:08and consciousness together.
10:10Second, the brain is not, or not just, a computer.
10:13So consciousness is unlikely to be
10:15a matter of computation of algorithm alone.
10:19Brains are the kinds of things for which you can't separate
10:21what they do from what they are.
10:23And silicon is not up to the job.
10:26And third, many other things about our biological brains and bodies
10:30might matter for consciousness,
10:31including a deep connection between consciousness and life.
10:36Artificial intelligence is computer software.
10:40It is not a living mind.
10:42It might give the impression of being conscious,
10:45but it is vanishingly unlikely that it actually is.
10:50I want to close by returning to why this matters so much.
10:54Take the idea of AI welfare.
10:58Now there are already influential groups advocating
11:00that AI systems should have their own rights
11:03based mainly on the idea that they might be or become conscious.
11:08Now if real artificial consciousness is on the way,
11:12maybe through some other technology or other pathway,
11:14then this is entirely justified.
11:16We humans have a terrible track record
11:19in our ethical treatment of non-human animals and of other humans,
11:22and we don't want to make the same mistake again.
11:25This is one reason why even trying to build conscious AI is a very bad idea.
11:33But if conscious AI is just an illusion created by design,
11:37as I think it is,
11:39then by extending rights to these systems,
11:41we’d be sacrificing our ability to control, to regulate them
11:45and perhaps even to turn them off and for no good reason at all.
11:49And this is one reason why even AI that merely seems to be conscious
11:53is very dangerous for our society, too.
11:56And unlike real artificial consciousness,
11:59conscious-seeming AI is either already here
12:03or coming very, very soon.
12:06There are other reasons we should avoid creating AI that seems to be conscious.
12:10It makes us more psychologically vulnerable.
12:12We might be more likely to do what an AI says
12:15if we believe that it really feels for us,
12:18that it really understands us,
12:20even if what it's telling us to do is very bad for us.
12:24And finally, the very idea of conscious AI undermines our human nature.
12:30The mirror of AI goes both ways.
12:33We see ourselves in our algorithms,
12:36but we also see our algorithms in ourselves.
12:40And when we do,
12:41when we think of the mind as a collection of computations
12:44floating free from their bases in biology,
12:47we reduce and we diminish what it is to be a living,
12:50breathing human being in a real world.
12:54(Applause)
12:58"Frankenstein,"
13:00which Mary Shelley wrote when she was just 19,
13:03is often taken as a cautionary tale,
13:06a warning against the hubris of bringing something to life,
13:09a Promethean sin like stealing fire from the gods.
13:14The idea of conscious AI is a new Promethean dream
13:18wrapped up in a silicon rapture.
13:22And if conscious AI is possible,
13:25then so is the prospect of uploading our own conscious minds
13:28and floating off to eternity in a silicon cloud of living,
13:32or at least existing forever
13:34in the pristine circuits of some future supercomputer.
13:39Now the seductive power of this vision --
13:41of being at such a pivotal point in the history of life on Earth --
13:45I suppose it's understandable.
13:47And back in the real world, talk of conscious AI does other things too --
13:51it conjures this sense of technological wonder and magic
13:55which might keep share prices aloft and regulators at bay.
14:02But we should resist.
14:04The sacrament of the algorithm is most likely an empty dream,
14:08delivering not post-human Paradise, but silicon oblivion.
14:13We need a different story.
14:16One in which we're more part of nature,
14:18not apart from it,
14:20with consciousness more closely tied to living flesh and blood,
14:23not to the dead sand of silicon.
14:27AI might claim the prize of intelligence, at least in some ways,
14:31but consciousness,
14:32consciousness remains ours to celebrate
14:35and to share with other living creatures.
14:39So let's not sell our minds so easily to our machine creations.
14:43If we do,
14:44we not only overestimate them,
14:47we underestimate ourselves.
14:49Thank you.
14:51(Cheers and applause)
14:55Thank you very much.