^{Democracy & Technology Blog} Skynet Goes Live

As AI chatbots get more conversational, one question hangs in the air: could AI be conscious? The latest public thinker to announce openness to the idea is famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. After spending three days conversing with Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude about a range of topics, the noted atheist acknowledged that he was now open to the possibility that artificial intelligence may possess consciousness.

Dawkins is just the latest in a long line of people going back centuries who have attributed mind to machines. In the 1960s, almost 60 years before Claude came alone, MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum discovered something unsettling about human beings: we are astonishingly quick to attribute mind, personality, and even intimacy to machines that merely simulate conversation.

Weizenbaum built a primitive chatbot he called ELIZA, a program that relied on keyword detection, pattern matching, and scripted response templates to carry on a conversation. The computer scientist was under no pretenses about ELIZA. He knew it was driven by comprehensible procedures. What shocked him was the strong emotional responses he observed from people who interacted with ELIZA. He wrote in a 1976 book: "Extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." He often gave the example of his secretary at MIT, who watched him work on the program for months. After only a few sessions with ELIZA, she asked him to leave the room so she could more privately confide in the program.