The first AI that feels.
AI with consciousness.
While science still struggles with the complicated task of testing, defining and understanding human consciousness, a startup called Nirvanic aims to apply theories about what consciousness is and AI models, and create the first sentient AI, this is the bold proposal of a researcher who believes she can develop the first one that is already genuinely conscious.
Combining quantum computing and advanced theories about the human mind, Dr. Suzanne Gildert who has worked with quantum computers and humanoid robots is now seeking to take a step further, applying quantum principles to develop an AI capable of making completely new decisions and situations, without rely solely on huge amounts of training data.
Instead of simple automatic reactions, this would seek something closer to attention and choice, characterizing a state that many would call consciousness.
But what would be the definition of conscience.
Researchers divide the concept into two parts, subjective experience and the ability to choose, the first would be our first-person perception, the movie we see around us, the second would be the feeling that we can interact with that movie and choose a path among several possible ones.
In current AI, most decisions occur unconsciously, based on patterns already seen, but real life is full of unknown situations where we cannot simply resort to past examples, that is where conscious quantum AI would come into action by making decisions. intuitive and learning with much less data.
The idea would be to use quantum computers to process sensory information, after converting classical data into qubits the system would evolve superpositions of states until collapsing into a single final action, chosen in a not totally predictable way, if this results in a performance superior to that of the ias in new scenarios, it would be the first step to verify the effectiveness of this method.
Although we do not yet know if this type of consciousness would be the same as Human consciousness, initial experiments could show glimpses of conscious behavior, in which decisions go beyond random, even a small advance would already be incredibly exciting, a sentient quantum AI It would be the future or just fiction.
As technology draws the line between imagination and reality becomes increasingly tenuous, projects like this one that combine philosophy, neuroscience, quantum computing and artificial intelligence show that the search for a living AI is really in humanity's plans, and this reminds me of what Arthur C. Clark said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
