2022 was a banner year for artificial intelligence, and particularly taking into account the launch of OpenAI’s incredibly impressive ChatGPT, the industry is showing no sign of stopping. But for some industry leaders, chatbots and image-generators are far from the final robotic frontier. Next up? Consciousness. “This topic was taboo,” Hod Lipson, the mechanical engineer in charge of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, told The New York Times. “We were almost forbidden from talking about it — ‘Don’t talk about the c-word; you won’t get tenure’ — so in the beginning I had to disguise it, like it was something else.” Consciousness is one of the longest standing, and most divisive, questions in the field of artificial intelligence. And while to some it’s science fiction — and indeed has been the plot of countless sci-fi books, comics, and films — to others, like Lipson, it’s a goal, one that would undoubtedly change human life as we know it… (READ MORE)

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