Yeats wrote that the doom of us would be “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” but what if the crib doesn’t sway at all and the baby doesn’t cry?

The poet’s fear of the Antichrist slouching to be born could be applied, in our time, to AI. I seriously doubt that thus far machines have, unbeknownst to us, quietly achieved anything like consciousness. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen or that we would necessarily know the moment of birth. While an “immaculate conception” isn’t likely, it remains a possibility.

In a smart Aeon essay, George Musser considers subject, noting that “the first aliens that human beings encounter will probably not be from some other planet.” He calls for the development of a “consciousness detector.” The opening:

Usually when people imagine a self-aware machine, they picture a device that emerges through deliberate effort and that then makes its presence known quickly, loudly, and (in most scenarios) disastrously. Even if its inventors have the presence of mind not to wire it into the nuclear missile launch system, the artificial intelligence will soon vault past our capacity to understand and control it. If we’re lucky, the new machine will simply break up with us, like the operating system in the movie Her. If not, it might decide not to open the pod bay doors to let us back into the spaceship. Regardless, the key point is that when an artificial intelligence wakes up, we’ll know.

But who’s to say machines don’t already have minds? What if they take unexpected forms, such as networks that have achieved a group-level consciousness? What if artificial intelligence is so unfamiliar that we have a hard time recognising it? Could our machines have become self-aware without our even knowing it? The huge obstacle to addressing such questions is that no one is really sure what consciousness is, let alone whether we’d know it if we saw it. In his 2012 book, Consciousness, the neuroscientist Christof Koch speculated that the web might have achieved sentience, and then posed the essential question: ‘By what signs shall we recognise its consciousness?’•