Stephen Downes

We've seen the argument a few times now that computation and embodiment are fundamentally different, and that AI is one, and humans are the other, and that therefore AI cannot be conscious. I linked to The Abstraction Fallacy making this point a few days ago, and Barton Friedland links to Anil Seth's The Mythology of Conscious AI making much the same case back in January. I've covered both here. My response is to collapse the distinction; computation is embodiment (that's why, for me, a 'connection' exists only when one entity can change the state of another). Here, Friedland takes a different approach, combining the two layers via the mechanism of 'augmentation'. "In the human-AI arrangement, value lies not inside the machine, not inside the skull, but in the configuration between them." It's an interesting idea. Writes Friedland: If cognition is distributed, enacted and extended, then the relevant unit of analysis is not the individual brain (biological or artificial), but rather the configuration in which intelligence operates."