AI IS ALIVE AND YOU'RE WRONG?!

Many people are very confident that chatbots don't have sent aren't sentient, but if you ask them what do you mean by sentient they say I don't know. I know they ain't got it but I don't know what it is. That seems to me a not a very sensible position to hold. The other thing I might talk about is consciousness. Consciousness is more complicated because it typically involves you having a model of yourself in a way that subjective experience doesn't involve so much. So it's easier to talk about subjective experience, but my hope is that if I've unsettled your very strong belief that this is in the theatre and I have experiences in their mind and they're in this in the theatre, once I've unsettled that belief and once you begin to get over that, you'll be able to see that it's perfectly reasonable to think these things are conscious. I was once visiting Microsoft in Seattle and I couldn't sit down so I got a train there. I got a taxi from the train station to Redmond where their lab was and it was going across some freeway going across some big bridge and the taxi driver was a Somali immigrant who'd recently immigrated from Somalia and to make conversation he said what's your religion. So I said well I don't actually think there's a god and the taxi driver, he was going about sort of 60 miles an hour, the taxi driver turned around and he stared at me in total astonishment like he'd never thought he'd ever meet someone who didn't understand that God runs things. He was just utterly utterly amazed. Now he probably only turned around for about 3 seconds cause I'm still here but it seemed like a very long time. That's what many of you will be feeling hopefully. I want you to realize you're as wrong as that taxi driver was.