Dawkins appears to have gone from atheist to AI-theist: perhaps he doesn’t view AI as God, but he certainly seems to see it as God-like
A
re you there God? It’s me, Arwa. I’ll be quite honest, I’m afraid I’ve never been a believer. I agreed wholeheartedly with Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, when he argued that belief in God is a “pernicious” delusion. But perhaps I should reconsider my position. Recent events have led me to question Dawkins’ judgment about life, the universe and everything.
Those recent events are the evolutionary biologist publicly concluding that AI may be conscious. In an op-ed, Dawkins recounted how he gave the Anthropic chatbot Claude the text of a novel he was writing. Dawkins writes: “He took a few seconds to read it and then showed … a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!’”
Oh dear. This shows a misunderstanding of large language models (LLMs) so profound that I feel moved to expostulate: “It bloody well isn’t!”
