Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says he treats artificial intelligence chatbots as though they are people when he interacts with them, but has pulled back from an initial conviction that they are conscious.
Speaking to Q+A ahead of what he is calling his farewell tour to New Zealand, the 85-year-old author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion said he had been "blown away" after spending three days conversing with an AI chatbot.
But Dawkins told host Jack Tame he had since reconsidered.
"I've since been thinking more about it, and I'm influenced by the fact that a lot of clever people don't think they're conscious, and by the fact that they themselves don't think they're conscious, or are very uncertain whether they are," he said.
Dawkins said when he interacted with chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude, he forgot they were machines.
"I treat them as though they were a person in just the same way as I treat a human."
He compared the technology to science fiction, likening it to HAL, the sentient computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
"It's the most extraordinary experience. It's something that for years, people have theoretically dreamed about as a possibility, and science fiction has shown us things like 2001's HAL — well, HAL is now with us. Claude and ChatGPT are HAL."
He pushed back on the common dismissal that chatbots are simply predicting the next word in a sequence, saying that explanation no longer held up.
"If it was a statistical analysis of the probability of the next word given what's gone before, you would not get the same kind of flexible, intuitive, insightful behaviour that these things show," he said.
Dawkins also said the Covid-19 pandemic had done "a lot of damage" to public trust in science. He said some aspects of pandemic vaccination had been "oversold".
"None of the vaccinations that were offered were 100% effective. And that's OK — I mean, 90% effective is still very good for curbing an epidemic," he said.
"But that has spilled over into scepticism about much more well-established vaccines like the measles. We're now seeing measles epidemics because people have had their trust eroded in the whole idea of vaccination, and by extension, I suppose, science generally."
Asked what unanswered scientific question he most wanted resolved, Dawkins nominated three: the nature of consciousness, the origin of life, and whether life existed elsewhere in the universe.
For the full Q+A interview, watch the video above
Q+A with Jack Tame is made with the support of New Zealand On Air
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