How “Conscious” are Artificial Neural Networks ?

And what does conscious mean in the first place ?

I recently stumbled upon a tweet by someone at a well known AI company that paraphrasing ( slightly ) said :

It’s possible that today’s massive neural networks are slightly conscious.

I can’t vouch either way for the author and the aforementioned massive neural net ( hence the vagueness ) but the question still remains, how “conscious” are current neural nets ? And that’s what we’ll explore here today.

Consciousness is a belief and semantic minefield, I am fascinated by what it is and how to emulate it in AI’s ( I even wrote a book , well a first part : Conscious Artificial Intelligence: Part 1. Foundations ), as I am also into Data Science,ML and ANNs ( think tensorflow ) I think I can see both ends.

For starter as I write in my book even if we made an AI that was “conscious” we would probably not recognize it as an equal ( well some wouldn’t ) and insist that there is more to consciousness than merely recreating the biological systems we possess. ( Only humans have a soul, a heart, that sort of thing ).

But if you are rational then the humbling* conclusion is that there is nothing special about consciousness and there is just missing knowledge and fuzzy terms. As a way to start clearing things I suggest you replace the word consciousness with awareness in which case you will start to see the topic in a new light . Self awareness, awareness of others, awareness of past events and on an on add and build up to what we usually call consciousness ( I call it meaningful consciousness for lack of a better term ) and in this light some constructs like ANNs and automation processes do share elements of consciousness but the devil is still in the details...

* I find it fascinating that the biggest obstacle to science ( and a guide of sorts through inversion ) is sometimes human hubris and belief systems... At one point we thought the earth was the center of the universe and it turned out we were wrong, our little solar system was believed to be unique, precious and our galaxy the end all be all, wrong again, billions of galaxies, billions of planets and life while…