Commentary: Can AI bots become conscious? Why Microsoft's AI boss says that's the wrong question

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Set us as preferred Mustafa Suleyman has some thoughts about whether artificial intelligence bots can become conscious.The answer, he says, is no.

What’s more, he says that AI developers should stop even speculating about it.What’s important about Suleyman’s take is that he is the chief executive of Microsoft AI, which makes him one of the top three or four figures in this ever-burgeoning business.Suleyman’s most recent analysis of the consciousness question appeared on his website on Sept.

16.There he took a shot at Anthropic, the leading AI company that — in his view, at least — has been the most sedulous promoter of the idea that AI “may be conscious, and if it is, then ...

humans potentially owe it a duty of care.”When OpenAI and Anthropic use anthropomorphic language, saying that their products go ‘rogue’, that their agents ‘collaborate,’ and that they ‘scheme’ to avoid detection, we need to recognize that they are trying to evade accountability.— Venture investor Roger McNameeThat’s fundamentally hazardous to our communal health, Suleyman wrote.“Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge,” he asserted.

“But controlling something that believes it may be conscious — that it’s entitled to our welfare and has rights of its own — may well be impossible.”To place these thoughts in a workaday context, it’s important to note that Microsoft treats Anthropic as a competitor in the AI space.At this moment, however, Microsoft is also one of Anthropic’s biggest customers.

Suleyman has been open about his desire to wean his company from that relationship: “We pay a lot of money to Anthropic, so our goal is to reduce and ultimately eliminate that cost,” he told Bloomberg recently.Commentary on economics and more f...