A new era has begun in which we will hear concepts such as 'digital consciousness' and 'digital living beings': Artificial intelligence is being underestimated.

While explaining these issues at a conference, a very valuable professor of ours said, "After all, these are private companies and they may be spreading such rumors for commercial purposes."

That's a very accurate observation. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI may be talking about super-intelligent, conscious AIs that they could invent to boost their valuations. This isn't unprecedented in Silicon Valley.

However, it is worth considering that the fact that companies and countries are spending trillions of dollars on technologies in this field, restricting chip exports that can make money, and some important scientists are warning us about this, is not done for an exaggerated issue.

For example, Professor Geoffrey Hinton, whom I've highlighted before, resigned from his lucrative and prestigious job at Google in 2023. He resigned for one reason: to warn humanity, without commercial consideration, about the risks of increasingly intelligent artificial intelligence.

In other words, if one of the most important architects of artificial intelligence, someone who devoted almost 55 years of his life to this work and received the Nobel Prize in 2024, gives up his own comfort to warn humanity, we can at least approach this issue with a slightly more open perception and question, "Are issues such as thinking, invention, and consciousness solely under the control of humanity?"

I think a new era has begun in which, at worst, we will hear concepts like “digital consciousness” and “digital living being”.

But most importantly, just as we once realized that “The Earth is the center of the universe” was wrong, the day may be approaching when we will also realize that “Man is the center of the world” is wrong.

'ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?

Recently I started to question the word “artificial” in artificial intelligence.

You know, when we say artificial flower, it creates the impression that it is a simple, plastic imitation of the real flower... This word artificial seems to diminish the main concept and creates the perception of a cheap imitation.

I see that we have simplified our perceptions of this new technology, which we call artificial intelligence, that we have not yet understood its true power, and that we treat it like a mobile phone application or a talking encyclopedia.

We need to get rid of this perception as soon as possible.

But for this to happen, we need to refresh our perceptions by replacing the word "artificial" with a more accurate one. It could be super-digital intelligence, advanced machine intelligence, carefully choosing your university departments, or urgently preparing for intelligence, or, I don't know, we need to find another definition.