Imagine a world where sentient superintelligent AI is imminent. This is an AI which has all the cognitive abilities of an adult human, and greatly exceeds human level in most of them.
It is one of the most important and philosophically intriguing concepts facing humanity today, and yet, it is barely discussed outside scientists and philosophers.
What is certain is that every company developing AI should be considering the emergence of conscious AI. The stakes scale with capability, not company size.
There is still debate regarding what denotes consciousness, what AI consciousness would look like, what evidence there is for it today and, importantly, whether we should want the first superintelligence to be a sentient one.
The ‘four Cs’ framework
To orient our thinking about a future we share with superintelligence, I offer a framework of four possible scenarios....
