Ilya Sutskever had said two days ago that that AI will eventually be able to do everything humans can do, because the mind could be modeled as digital computer. But not everyone agrees that this will be the case.
Stuart Hameroff, who is a retired Anesthesiologist and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at The University of Arizona, has said that Ilya Sutskever is wrong when he says that the brain can be modeled through a computer. “Ilya Sutskever is wrong on this,” he posted on X. “The brain is not a digital computer and not really a computer at all, more like a quantum orchestra. Biology is based on organic carbon which supports quantum processes and self-similar dynamics in hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz and terahertz in microtubules, composed of tubulin, the brain’s most abundant protein. And while computers can learn, they’re not conscious, cannot feel, and have no intrinsic motivation. That’s why no AGI,” he added.
“Anything which I can learn, anything which any one of you can learn, the AI could do as well,” Sutskever had recently said. “How can I be so sure of that? The reason is that all of us have a brain, and the brain is a biological computer. So why can’t a digital computer, a digital brain, do the same things?” he had added.
Hameroff is best known for his Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) theory, which he co-developed with Nobel Laureate Sir Roger Penrose. It postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons, rather than being a product of neural connections. The mechanism is held to be a quantum process called objective reduction that is orchestrated by cellular structures called microtubules.
Hameroff’s and Sutskever’s views represent different views on the nature of the human brain. Sutskever seems to favour a materialist approach, in which the brain is composed on neurons, and with enough technical progress, the capabilities of the brain, along with consciousness, can be entirely recreated through techniques like neural networks. Hameroff, however, contends that there’s more to the brain than just neurons, and believes that quantum phenomenon inside cells in small structures called microtubules gives rise to consciousness. His ORCH-OR theory directly challenges the materialist view of consciousness as an emergent property of the brain’s complexity, suggesting instead that consciousness has a non-computable, quantum origin. It remains to be seen how these debates will shape up in the coming years, but as humans rapidly create more and more sophisticated AI systems, their comparisons with the human brain will likely become ever more commonplace.