Sir Clive Sinclair on philosophical problem posed by AI; 1984

Sir Clive Sinclair, speaking in 1984, on the philosophical problems posed by developing artificial intelligence and determining emotions and consciousness. “We come up against some extraordinarily interesting, I think, philosophical problems. First of all, we know that we’re conscious by analogy. I know that you and I have similar brains so we know what we mean by ‘being conscious’ but as far as I can see, we may never know if a machine is conscious. It may say it is but how can we tell, there’s no way to measure it. We can only know another being is conscious by analogy, so we don’t know if they’ll be conscious or not. I can’t understand what consciousness is so I can’t build it into the machine at present. I mean one day maybe philosophically we’ll overcome that. But the question whether it’ll write Shakespeare’s sonnets, or sonnets as good as Shakespeare wrote.. clearly you can certainly ask it to write a sonnet. Whether you find it as good as Shakespeare’s or not will remain to be seen. It’s an uncomfortable thought if you did because it hasn’t got Shakespeare’s emotions and in one sense, it won’t have but of course, it might have its’ own emotions.”" (NBSF439W - AEVZ001J)