"The most advanced AI is not conscious. It actually has an entirely different basis. It is not alive. It has no body. It has no feelings. It does not participate in some sort of struggle for survival or anything like that. It doesn't actually care about what it's doing.
The point is not really whether it is more or less intelligent than a human being, which people seem to be obsessed with answering. As I've said, it's already superhuman in many ways. In other ways, it can be very very stupid. But they are fundamentally different things. It's an extension to our consciousness that we have made which if used correctly would have tremendous advantages for ourselves, allowing us to save energy and discover new materials. If we had a socialist society it would allow us to plan the economy much better because we could centralize all the data and allow AI to spot patterns.
It is a tremendously powerful thing but it also rather limited and one-sided. But that's not a bad thing. That's not a mistake. We ont want something that's somehow independently conscious, we already have humans for that, and we know how to create new human beings.
There is no magic ingredient to consciousness. There's no mystical property to it that we haven't yet discovered. There's no "perceptronium" out there. No new state of matter that needs to be discovered and understood. It is not a direct product of the soul of some technical wizardry of the brain.
To understand it scientifically we have to grasp the role of consciousness in society. To understand anything you have to be active. You don't understand something by just being passive and having no interest in it. Therefore of course it's no coincidence that the ones who really understand society the best are the ones struggling to change it, who then discover how society really is, without illusions, in other words Marxists, communists. And it's in the struggle to change society that we really become self-conscious as human beings, where we understand what society is without illusions. And when we take control of society in our hands properly as a species, collectively, that is when we will really understand what we are doing and why and adjust our behavior accordingly. So that we may finally live to our full capacities, and not live in this kind of confused and alienated existence that we do under capitalism."
