AI consciousness: scientists say we urgently need answers

The better AI gets at doing our work for us, the more we outsource our thinking to it. Thus, as we make machines more humanlike, they make us more machinelike. Perhaps we should be less worried about AI becoming conscious, than about humanity becoming unconscious.

Clune also stresses the importance of thinking about the ethics of the new technology from the start. There is a good chance that AI-designed neural networks and algorithms will be even harder to understand than today’s already opaque black-box systems.