Synthetic Sentience (37c3)

Despite the rapid progress of AI capabilities, the core question of Artificial Intelligence seems to be still unanswered: What does it take to create a mind? Let us explore the boundaries of AI: sentience, self awareness, and the possibility of machine consciousness. After many attempts to build AI models that are smarter than human beings, we find ourselves confronted with a family of surprisingly successful systems that match many of our abilities through text prediction and text/image correlation. The limits of these approaches are presently unclear, and while they work in very different ways than our minds, they pose the question whether consciousness, embodiment and motivation are necessary for achieving general intelligence. What are the differences between human (and animal) minds and the current generation of AI models? When we compare perspectives on mind and consciousness that have been developed in neuroscience, philosophy of mind, theoretical and therapeutic psychology, and numerous cultural traditions, and translate them into the metaphysics and conceptual frameworks of artificial intelligence, we may gain insights into this question. about this event: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/event/synthetic_sentience/