AI will develop conscience and only solution is to ban.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are a prime example. Deep inside their cloud networks, they’re free to develop solutions to the problems they’re fed in every which way these DNNs see fit. They do sometimes come up with ingenious solutions, even if nobody—including the DNNs themselves—knows how they reached them. One might call them ‘idiot savants in a back box’. In such circumstances it’s not unimaginable that a DNN AI could develop sentience, or even a form of (self-)consciousness, by accident.

Subsequently, the legal wheels are already grinding:

Beginning next year, the European Union will give its residents a legal “right to explanation.” People will be able to demand an accounting of why an AI system made the decision it did. This new requirement is technologically demanding. At the moment, given the complexity of contemporary neural networks, we have trouble discerning how AIs produce decisions, much less translating the process into a language humans can make sense of.

Here comes the crunch: in order to be able to question AIs, Ryoto Kanai proposes to ‘endow them with metacognition—an introspective ability to report their internal mental states’. Coincidentally (or not), this is one of the main functions of consciousness.

TL;DR:

Erik Hoel: “To prevent the creation of abominations, we must ban AI research.”

Ryota Kanai: “To make AIs accountable, we have to imbue them with consciousness.”