Could AI Be Conscious?
Anthropic's new constitution for Claude acknowledges the difficulty of assessing its moral patienthood, and CEO Dario Amodei says the company cannot rule out the possibility that Claude is conscious. Philosopher David Chalmers predicts a significant chance of conscious LLMs within a decade, and Claude itself estimates a 5% to 40% probability of being a moral patient. Modern AI systems are approaching the complexity of a mouse brain and may reach human brain levels within five to ten years.
In January, the AI company Anthropic published a new constitution for Claude, its most advanced large language model (LLM), which contained the comment: “We are caught in a difficult position where we neither want to overstate the likelihood of Claude’s moral patienthood nor dismiss it out of hand.” A month later, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei went on a podcast and said his company couldn’t rule out the possibility that Claude was conscious. Philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness”, has said there is a significant chance of conscious LLMs within a decade. And what about Claude itself? When asked during testing to estimate the probability that it is a moral patient, meaning that its wellbeing matters in its own right, it gave numbers ranging from 5% to 40% and stressed how uncertain it was.
Modern AI systems are extraordinarily complex, and they are advancing fast. In terms of structural complexity and computational scale, by some measures a few are already in the range of a mouse brain, and at recent growth rates, they could reach the range of a human brain within five to 10 years.