Opinion | AI’s Behavior Will Matter More Than Its Mind

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. states that “a long fight is brewing over whether AIs are conscious” (“Will the AI Frenzy Add Up to Anything?” Business World, Sept. 26). Much has been debated about when or whether this will happen, but neuroscientists like me and my colleagues can’t even truly agree on a definition of what consciousness is.

In the case of AI, this debate is moot. It doesn’t matter whether we can define whether AI will become conscious, but behavior is what matters. There is ample evidence that its behavior is almost indistinguishable from that of conscious beings. It won’t be long before these programs operate at the same level as a 10-year-old who has mastered the fundamentals of reading and can learn independently from that point forward. At that point it doesn’t matter whether AI is conscious or not; it matters what it does.

Matthews W. Gwynn, M.D. FAAN

Peggy Noonan’s “Trump Is in Denial About AI’s Danger” (Declarations, Sept. 26) and Mr. Jenkins’s “Will the AI Frenzy Add Up to Anything?” look at the same rapidly developing technology and come away with strikingly different conclusions. Ms. Noonan sees an approaching danger requiring urgent action. Mr. Jenkins sees serious risks but warns against confused, hurried responses.

Their disagreement illustrates something missing from much of the current debate: We keep talking about AI as though it were one thing. But there is an enormous difference between increasingly autonomous frontier systems that may act with limited human supervision and the AI tools already being used every day in medicine, science, education and business.

We should take the warnings of Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Geoffrey Hinton and others seriously without allowing fears about tomorrow’s frontier systems to frighten us from responsibly using today’s technology.

Perhaps the sensible position lies somewhere between Ms. Noonan’s alarm and Mr. Jenkins’s restraint: Be cautious about the frontier, but decisive about responsible adoption.

Mark R. Gianniny

Rochester, N.Y.