🗣 Demis Hassabis thinks his dog is conscious. Today's AI, he says, is not

The Google DeepMind co-founder says today's AI is very smart, yet he doesn't feel it is "at all conscious yet". His dog is the reverse:

"My pet dog — he's lovely, and he's pretty conscious, I think. He dreams and everything, but he's not that smart."

So intelligence and consciousness can exist apart, he told Reid Hoffman at the Masters of Scale Summit in October. He wants labs to build intelligent tools, not conscious beings. An AI with a will of its own could refuse when people tell it to stop or switch itself off, h