Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
A book is not intelligent. It’s matter is not arranged in a structure that allows for the flow of information through it, changing it as it does, and resulting in any output information, determined by the route of signals of information passed through the structure in it’s current arrangement. With self correction to reach the optimal output to the external entity which is supplying the primary input parameters.
That is what is required. It’s a matter of arrangement, not material. You need self learning/training, real time input, and output that reliably varies on the input parameters. If you’ve created that, you’ve duplicated the exact behavior of all life. Whether you’ve done it in meat neurons, transistor-batch neurons, or any other method of arranging units, of any arrangement of matter, such that it results in granular output of positive/negative signals.
“Intelligence” is an inelegant word to describe autonomous, self correcting and ameliorating structure. It’s not some nebulous spiritual existence that permeates an unknown location within that structure. It is the structure - the precise, exact arrangements of neurons that connect, fire positively and negatively, rearrange when self-learning corrects the state of the structure, and it results in informational output that anything external can interact with and judge.