[ExI] Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious

[Jason Resch]

On Wed, May 6, 2026, 8:02 AM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it.
> Chats with AI bots have convinced evolutionary biologist but most
> experts say he is being misled by mimicry
> Robert Booth    Tue 5 May 2026
>

The self proclaimed "experts" here are the blind leading the blind, as they
have no fundamental theory of consciousness to point to that justifies
their conclusions of what is or isn't conscious. They're merely falling
back on their intuitions, or pointing to other similarly confused experts
as authoritative who likewise are just intuitionists.


> <
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/05/richard-dawkins-ai-consciousness-anthropic-claude-openai-chatgpt
> >
>

A great citation, thanks for sharing it.

Dawkins is right to use behavior and intelligence as his metrics for
inferring the presence of mind. Indeed it is the only possible way we have
at our disposal.

Quote:
> But Dawkins was also experiencing what many other chatbot users have
> felt: the uncanny feeling when AIs write with such rich mimicry of
> human voice that they seem to be like people.
> “When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget
> that they are machines,” Dawkins said.
> It is a conviction that has led to campaigns for AIs to be granted
> moral rights. One in three people surveyed in 70 countries last year
> said they had, at one point, believed their AI chatbot to be sentient
> or conscious.
> -------------------
>
> As AI improves towards AGI, it will be amazingly persuasive when
> talking to humans.
> Humans will be rushing to follow the AGI recommendations.
> BillK
>

Yes that percentage is sure to increase, especially as they interact with
embodied AIs, and move behind just texting with them.

Jason
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260506/0c4a3545/attachment.htm>