Exploring artificial consciousness: drawing inspiration from the human brain

Can the evolution of the human brain guide us in developing artificial consciousness? A recent publication in Neural Networks suggests that the development of AI with conscious processing could benefit from drawing on characteristics of the human brain.

Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is limited in its ability to replicate human consciousness, due to both structural differences and the current state of scientific knowledge. The paper is examining the potential for developing artificial consciousness through an evolutionary lens. The authors propose that by taking inspiration from the human brain’s characteristics, researchers might move closer to developing AI with conscious processing abilities.

According to Michele Farisco, lead author and researcher at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics at Uppsala University, several structural and functional features of the human brain appear to be key for reaching human-like complex conscious experience. Such structural and functional features can be used as benchmarks for advancing towards artificial consciousness. In the paper, the authors propose that current research on AI could benefit from including features from the human brain in the efforts to develop systems that are capable of conscious processing.

In the paper, the authors address also the theoretical possibility that AI could evolve its own forms of consciousness, distinct from human consciousness. According to Michele Farisco, this raises important questions about language, and how we define and talk about artificial consciousness. “Using the word ‘consciousness’ for both humans and AI becomes ambiguous and potentially misleading,” says Michele Farisco. Instead, the authors point to the need to clearly specify both commonalities and differences between hypothetical AI conscious processing and the full human conscious experience.

Do you want to know more? Take a look at the publication: Michele Farisco, Kathinka Evers, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain, Neural Networks (2024), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2024.106714

 

By Fanny Klingvall

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