AI Consciousness Compared to Alchemy: A Researcher Argues We're Missing Fundamental Science

UCSD artist and AI researcher Memo Akten argues that believing AI is conscious or near-conscious is analogous to alchemists who thought they could transmute lead into gold — they needed quantum mechanics, not better furnaces.

Memo Akten, an artist and researcher at UC San Diego, published a thread comparing current AI consciousness discourse to alchemy. The analogy is precise and worth unpacking: alchemists weren't irrational — they had a coherent theory, they experimented rigorously, and they occasionally produced useful byproducts. But they were missing an entire layer of physics. Akten argues that AI consciousness proponents are in an analogous position: they may be sophisticated, but they're working without the foundational theory that would make the problem tractable.

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