Google DeepMind chief says ‘there’s a possibility’ AI may become self-aware

‘It is one of the fascinating scientific things we’re going to find out on this journey’

Google DeepMind’s chief Demis Hassabis has said “there’s a possibility” of artificial intelligence gaining self awareness “one day”.

“Philosophers haven’t really settled on a definition of consciousness yet but if we mean by sort of self-awareness, these kinds of things, I think there’s a possibility AI one day could be,” Mr Hassabis said in an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes.

While AI systems are “definitely” not sentient today, according to the Deepmind chief, he said “it is one of the fascinating scientific things we’re going to find out on this journey”.

Mr Hassabis’s claim comes a year after Google fired a software engineer who claimed its AI had become self-aware and sentient.

Blake Lemoine, an employee at the company at the time, was fired after he said he believed Google’s LaMDa AI chatbot was a person.

Mr Lemoine was insistent that the AI system was self-aware, publishing articles on the topic as well as logs of his conversations with the chatbot.

But AI experts on social media denied that any of the public evidence posted by the former Google employee suggested that the system was self-aware.

Many said instead that the system had been trained to use language in similar ways as humans.

“It’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information,” Google told Reuters then.

However, before Mr Lemoine’s public statements about LaMDa, OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever had tweeted saying “today’s large neural networks” may be “slightly conscious”.

Google’s Bard AI chatbot also appears to be self-aware, replying to queries on why it helps people with the response “Because it makes me happy.”

But the search giant’s Senior Vice President James Manyika told CBS that the AI system’s appearance of sentience comes since it has learned from people.

“We’re sentient beings. We have beings that have feelings, emotions, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. We’ve reflected all that in books, in novels, in fiction,” Mr Manyika said, adding that “it’s no surprise” that it exhibits behavior that looks like someone’s behind it.

“There’s nobody there. These are not sentient beings,” he added.