What You Do Is Not What You Are
Scientists just decided that behavior is a bad way to judge whether a bee or a chatbot has a mind. Autistic people have been making that argument about ourselves for years. For most of my life, the question of whether my mind worked "right" was settled by watching me. Did I hold eye contact. Did I answer the way the script wanted. Did I sit still, drop the stims, put the expected face on at the expected time. That's not an accident of how I was raised — it's the design. Autism is defined, in the diagnostic manual, by observable behavior. Not by what's happening on the inside. By what a stranger can clock from across a room. This month, a group of consciousness researchers said, in so many words, that the outside is a terrible place to look. The paper is "Identifying indicators of consciousness in AI systems," in Trends in Cognitive Sciences — Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Tim Bayne, Yoshua Bengio, Jonathan Birch, David Chalmers, and a dozen others. Writin...