{"id":269323,"date":"2025-11-03T18:37:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T18:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/269323\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T18:37:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T18:37:11","slug":"microsoft-ai-chief-warns-pursuing-machine-consciousness-is-a-gigantic-waste-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/269323\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft AI Chief Warns Pursuing Machine Consciousness Is a Gigantic Waste of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Head of Microsoft\u2019s AI division Mustafa Suleyman thinks that AI developers and researchers should stop trying to build conscious AI.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think that is work that people should be doing,\u201d Suleyman told CNBC<\/a> in an interview last week.<\/p>\n

Suleyman thinks that while AI can definitely get smart enough to reach some form of superintelligence<\/a>, it is incapable of developing the human emotional experience that is necessary to reach consciousness. At the end of the day, any \u201cemotional\u201d experience that AI seems to experience is just a simulation, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur physical experience of pain is something that makes us very sad and feel terrible, but the AI doesn\u2019t feel sad when it experiences \u2018pain,’\u201d Suleyman told CNBC. \u201cIt\u2019s really just creating the perception, the seeming narrative of experience and of itself and of consciousness, but that is not what it\u2019s actually experiencing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be absurd to pursue research that investigates that question, because they\u2019re not [conscious] and they can\u2019t be,\u201d Suleyman said.<\/p>\n

Consciousness is a tricky thing to explain. There are multiple scientific theories that try to describe what consciousness could be. According to one such theory, posited by famous philosopher John Searle<\/a> who died last month, consciousness is a purely biological phenomenon that cannot be truly replicated by a computer. Many AI researchers, computer scientists and neuroscientists also subscribe to this belief.<\/p>\n

Even if this theory turns out to be the truth, that doesn\u2019t keep users from attributing consciousness to computers.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, because the remarkable linguistic abilities of LLMs are increasingly capable of misleading people, people may attribute imaginary qualities to LLMs,\u201d Polish researchers Andrzej Porebski and Yakub Figura wrote in a study published last week, titled \u201cThere is no such thing as conscious artificial intelligence.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

In an essay published on his blog in August, Suleyman warned against \u201cseemingly conscious AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe arrival of Seemingly Conscious AI is inevitable and unwelcome. Instead, we need a vision for AI that can fulfill its potential as a helpful companion without falling prey to its illusions,\u201d Suleyman wrote.<\/p>\n

He argues that AI cannot be conscious and the illusion it gives of consciousness could trigger interactions that are \u201crich in feeling and experience,\u201d a phenomenon that has been dubbed as \u201cAI psychosis\u201d<\/a> in the cultural lexicon.<\/p>\n

There have been numerous high-profile incidents in the past year of AI-obsessions that drive users to fatal delusions, manic episodes and even suicide.<\/p>\n

With limited guardrails in place to protect vulnerable users, people are wholeheartedly believing that the AI chatbots they interact with almost every day are having a real, conscious experience. This has led people to \u201cfall in love\u201d with their chatbots, sometimes with fatal consequences like when a 14-year old shot himself to \u201ccome home<\/a>\u201d to Character.AI\u2019s personalized chatbot or when a cognitively-impaired man died while trying to get to New York to meet Meta\u2019s chatbot in person.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust as we should produce AI that prioritizes engagement with humans and real-world interactions in our physical and human world, we should build AI that only ever presents itself as an AI, that maximizes utility while minimizing markers of consciousness,\u201d Suleyman wrote in the blog post. \u201cWe must build AI for people, not to be a digital person.\u201d<\/p>\n

But because the nature of consciousness is still contested, some researchers are growing worried that the technological advancements in AI might outpace our understanding of how consciousness works.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we become able to create consciousness \u2013 even accidentally \u2013 it would raise immense ethical challenges and even existential risk,\u201d Belgian scientist Axel Cleeremans<\/a> said last week, announcing a paper he co-wrote calling for consciousness research to become a scientific priority.<\/p>\n

Suleyman himself has been vocal about developing \u201chumanist superintelligence\u201d rather than god-like AI, even though he believes that superintelligence won\u2019t materialize any time within the next decade.<\/p>\n

\u201ci just am more more fixated on \u2018how is this actually useful for us as a species?\u2019 Like that should be the task of technology,\u201d Suleyman told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Head of Microsoft\u2019s AI division Mustafa Suleyman thinks that AI developers and researchers should stop trying to build…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[49096,182,181,507,1281,67252,37810,74],"class_list":["post-269323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-agi","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-microsoft","tag-mustafa-suleyman","tag-superintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}