Might be late to a comeback.
Anyways, there are several things to mention about AIs.
As you learn from PheáčapiáčážĆ«pama Sutta the consciousness is an illusion.
Form is like a lump of foam,
Feeling like a water bubble;
Perception is like a mirage,
Volitions like a plantain trunk,
And consciousness like an illusion,
So explained the Kinsman of the Sun.
On this view, human-like consciousness means having a particular kind of illusion. If machines are to have human-like consciousness then they must be subject to this same kind of illusion. However, making human-like consciousness shows some similarity to a God-given soul as the seat of consciousness.
With consciousness being subjective, any objective test fails to grasp it. In fact we donât know how to recognise consciousness in anything at all. This is a problem we usualy ignore, and we think we know what our consciousness is like and we assume on others likewise. We cannot test or identify consciousness so easily for animals, and it would be even more difficult with machines. On the other hand, finding consciousness and puting it in a machine is impossible since consciousness is subjective. This is an âextra ingredientâ, that if we could give it to machines, ensuring their consciousness. Nonetheless, this is not materialistic to fix into a machine. further, it should be a result of the main process occur in the machine.
Programming human-like AI with preferences, tastes, and aversions seems to be only of concern to a small number of theorists. In real case, we want medical software that can diagnosis diseases better than a humans, not a program that prefers to treat some diseases or patients over others with its own emotions which is some times disastrous.
A part of the eight fold path is the rational and
meditative investigation of oneâs own mental
and physical processes, until an individual is firmly aware of the nature of the self-illusion and the impermanence. If creating human-like consciousness in machines is the case, it is simply programming a Craving Self. Then it should comprise five skandhas and six ayatanas. Which makes us to think of whether these constituents of consciousness can be disaggregated in an AI. According to Buddhism, consciousness requires each of these five constantly evolving skandhas where the skandhas are causally encoded with kamma that passes from one life to another. However, the mechanism of kamma is unclear and identified as a acinteyya dhamma. In fact, to think like a human, AIs need to interact with the physical world through senses that gives them the same experience of objects, causality, states of matter, surfaces, and boundaries, as an infant would have.
In spite of that, there is no real self, just a process of arbitrary boundary creation: âthe virtual self is evident because it provides a surface for interaction, but itâs not evident if you try to locate it. These sensations would have to give rise to attraction or craving, and then to more complex volitional intentions and thoughts. For an infant these are simple things such as the desire for food or milk and to be held, and anger towards not recieving attention, etc.
Programming too high a level of positive emotion in an artificial mind would deny the capacity for empathy with other beings and it would be same in the otherway. What makes us humans are the emotions, unless you are an arahant, where suffering is a part of life. Training an algorithm to have thousands of deferent emotions, craving, heatred, karuna, maitree, metta, etc, would be impossible. However, if someone argues there is no need of these emotions then where exactly is the human or the being.
As I mentioned above, the mind leads the world on where the body (form) should come second(Mind SN1.62, See also, kammasutta). Development and functioning of the body is governed by the mind. When it comes to an AI, the body is created earlier and then only the appearance of the mind occurs, more precisely installation of the mind is done. On top of all the above facts, this single fact would be enough to deny the possibility of human-like AI to be a reality.