AI/machine learning

Can AI Become Conscious?

"Sooner or later, we will get machines that are at least as intelligent as humans are," says Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington.

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Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

At the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, a large-scale effort is under way to understand how the 86 billion neurons in the human brain are connected. The aim is to produce a map of all the connections: the connectome. Scientists at the institute are now reconstructing one cubic millimeter of a mouse brain, the most complex ever reconstructed. Mapping how exactly the brain is wired will help us to understand how healthy brains function and what goes wrong in diseased brains.

Chief scientist and president of the institute is neuroscientist Christof Koch. Together with the codiscoverer of DNA, Francis Crick, Koch pioneered the neurobiological study of consciousness. With neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, Koch codeveloped the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness, grounded in the mathematics of systems theory. In 2019, Koch published the book The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed.

If there is one scientist in the world who can shed light on the intriguing question of whether or not machines can become conscious, it is Koch.

What is the essence of the integrated information theory?

"The theory fundamentally says that any physical system that has causal power onto itself is conscious. What do I mean by causal power? The firing of neurons in the brain that causes other neurons to fire a bit later is one example, but you can also think of a network of transistors on a computer chip: Its momentary state is influenced by its immediate past state and it will, in turn, influence its future state. The more the current state of a system specifies its cause, the input, and its effect, the output, the more causal power the system has. Integrated information is a number that can be computed. The bigger the number for a system, the larger its integrated information, and the more conscious the system is."

Does the theory have practical consequences?

"Yes, it does. The theory has given rise to the construction of a consciousness meter that is being tested in various clinics in the US and in Europe. The idea is to detect whether seriously brain-injured patients are conscious or whether truly no one is home. Patients in a vegetative state lie in bed, are unable to voluntary move or speak, sometimes can't even move their eyes anymore, but the consciousness meter tells us that about a fifth of them remain conscious, in line with brain-imaging experiments."

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