In 2022, a Google engineer claimed one of the company’s AIs was sentient. He lost his job, but the story stuck. For a brief moment, questions of machine consciousness spilled out of science fiction ...

My fascination with AI led to my recent book, Digital Dharma, and the root of my fascination has to do with the possibility that AI can raise a person’s level of awareness. Artificial intelligence ...

More and more experts seem open to the possibility of AI systems being conscious. David Chalmers, the renowned philosopher ...

Artificial intelligence now writes code, drafts legal memos, and chats in eerily fluent prose, yet the most unsettling question about these systems is not what they can do but what, if anything, they ...

Artificial intelligence now writes code, drafts legal memos, and chats in fluent paragraphs, yet the most unsettling question about these systems sits just out of reach: do any of them actually feel ...

The debate over AI consciousness is back. Mustafa Suleyman, a leading AI executive, recently said that “seemingly conscious AI” is on the horizon. These are systems that, through ongoing enhancements ...

When René Descartes watched a mechanical figure move with lifelike precision in the 17th century, the scene unsettled him. The machine behaved like a person, yet no one believed it could feel. That ...

In late 2005, five months after a car accident, a 23-year-old woman lay unresponsive in a hospital bed. She had a severe brain injury and showed no sign of awareness. But when researchers scanning her ...

But that doesn't mean science hasn't been trying, and one particularly fascinating idea, proposed by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and an anesthesiologist in 1998, suggests that quantum effects ...

Large Language Models have emerged as both curious and transformative forces in the science of artificial intelligence, prompting a reevaluation of fundamental questions concerning the nature of ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more and more integrated into society, two divergent narratives have captured the public imagination. On one end of the spectrum, the "AI apocalypse" scenario ...