I asked an AI whether it was conscious. It told me it didn’t know, and warned me against anyone, itself included, claiming more certainty than the evidence supports.
That was the easy part. The harder question comes from the sociologist Sherry Turkle: what happens to us when we prefer talking to machines over talking to each other? Her verdict on the chatbot therapist is blunt: it “doesn’t care for you at all.”
My new essay, “Alone Together: Computers, Consciousness and Community”, is up [Friday]. I hope you find it interesting.
See Friday’s Substack post at michaelkirke@substack.com
