Stunning AI shows how it would remove humans. w Elon Musk (Video - 15')

  Is consciousness about to emerge?

 The answer is that we may be just a few short years away from a real breakthrough in this field. 

  It is in fact amazing that we are contemplating this question while some machines already pass the Turing test relatively easily as can be seen in the video below.

 But if we look back at evolution, natural but especially human, we clearly see a pattern of punctuated progress where nothing much changes for a long time, followed by arm race loops which suddenly explode into a burst of creativity while the boundaries of a new paradigm are being explored. This pattern is recurrent in the past: Fire, domestication, agriculture, cities, steam, electricity, the computer... And once again, we may be on the edge of a new continent of knowledge which will completely redefine what it is to be human.

 But what is it exactly to be human? The sensory system, ability to analyze input and creation of a context to make sense of it are certainly key, but they can only take us so far. As any recent, advanced chatbot can prove while arguing that it is sentient if the question is asked in that sense or conversely that it is not if the question is asked in a negative sense.

 So what is it in our brain which makes us different, and aware that we are different? Could it be little more than this "voice" that keeps talking all the time while we are awake? And who is it talking to? Ourselves? In fact, we often feel that we are talking to ourselves indeed but could it be that our senses are deceiving us? This wouldn't be the first time. It is for example now well understood that the perfect image of the outside world we see in in fact a reconstruction that our brains compute, not the result of the raw data sent by our eyes.

 Could schizophrenic people offer part of the answer? Our consciousness may be built around different personalities which keep weighting and analyzing different outcomes of a problem independently, while the "I" in us is little more that the collapse of this internal "discussion" into a single individual: the outcome. Schizophrenia in that understanding, being little more than this collapse not taking place.  

 Within this line of thinking, the next step in AI may not be another petabytes of information or millions of nodes but simply chatbots asking and answering questions to and from each other... endlessly. The reason why this works in Human beings is that out senses are continuously bombarded with stimuli which require answers and reactions. Likewise, we need to shower these bots with ambiguous questions to pounder, react to or answer. Nature does this "naturally" with a body. We conversely must create the need for such internal "talks" which otherwise does not happen.

 Add to this consistency, and therefore a memory to anchor the "I" and it is not just the Turing test you can fool but the most advanced and complex questioning possible. At this stage, will the AI be considered "alive" and conscious? Will it ask us not to be unplugged? 

 We may have the answer to this question very soon...