Is AI Conscious? The Risks of Technology Turning Human Nature into Data

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a dominant force in recent years, surpassing other technologies in public attention and application. While biotechnology has extended healthspan and brought personalized medicine, AI has become a cognitive technology, perceived as conscious and similar to humans. AI's rapid rise has raised concerns over its potential risks and ethical implications, prompting calls for immediate technical and social restraints.

However, a significant hurdle in the AI discourse is the belief in machine sentience and consciousness, which has led to a detachment from reality and an erroneous belief system. This belief affects not only society but also the scientific community, as extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, a standard often disregarded when AI generates content that aligns with human desires.

AI systems generate text through token prediction, mimicking aspects of human language, but this does not establish a subjective state or consciousness. The discussion around AI's intelligence and consciousness can be seen as an attempt to technify human nature, reducing individuals to probabilistic indicators for prediction markets.

This development has been accelerated by social media and AI, which have already begun this process. The implications of this technification are profound, as it reduces human beings to computational processes, with far-reaching ethical, mental, social, political, and spiritual consequences.