Are AIs Conscious in FMT?

A popular question actively being discussed in today's world is whether AIs are conscious or may become conscious in the near future. Since FMT suggests that mind exist all the way down to the quantum scale, does the theory suggest that AIs also have minds?

The short answer is no.  FMT suggests the computers that host AI software have rudimentary forms of mind, but the software that creates AI intelligence is completely mindless. 

Computer Minds

The collective mind of the subatomic particles that form a computer lack the type of flexible, dynamic, electromagnetically active substrate that is essential for minds to combine to form more complex minds. On the one hand the computer chips that process information and run algorithms certainly have a huge amount of electrons flowing their transistors and logic circuits, which certainly qualifies as an electromagnetically active substrate.

On the other hand, all modern electronic devices use a significant amount of shielding to prevent electromagnetic signals flowing in one circuit from interfering with signals flowing in other nearby circuits. As engineers shrink modern chip transistors to the nanometer scale, shielding becomes ever more important to prevent crosstalk and leakage currents from creating electromagnetic interference (EMI) that can cause data errors.

The shielding embedded within all modern electronics would thus prevent the electromagnetic emissions that combine rudimentary minds from forming more complex minds, eliminating the possibility of advanced intelligence and complex subjective experience in their matter structures.  Each individual silicon transistor, plus some nearby copper, aluminum, and tungsten atoms within the shielded transistor portion of the chip will form a nanoscale matter mind. But by design these minds cannot combine electromagnetically due to the shielding, thus a modern computer chip contains trillions of tiny isolated nanoscale matter minds.

Quantum Computer Minds

This leads to the question of the minds of quantum computers, which operate via quantum bits, or qubits, as opposed to digital 1's and 0's. The qubits are electromagnetically isolated and shielded to prevent them from interfering with each other, similar to the isolation and shielding of transistors in conventional computers. Qubits have much smaller matter substrates than transistors hence have less complex minds.

Quantum computers are also designed to operate a few degrees absolute zero to reduce quantum scale noise. That supercooling is necessary to create a functional quantum computing substrate has led to the view that the human mind cannot involve quantum processes because biology operates on a wet and warm substrate. FMT takes the exact opposite view. The flexible, wet, warm, electromagnetically active and unshielded substrates of living matter is required for complex minds to function. Supercooled quantum computers likely operate predictably because the extreme likely prevents the quantum scale minds of qubits from influencing the behavior of their matter substrates.

Mindless AI

Regardless of the computing platform an AI runs on, these tools are software programs consisting of a set of abstract rules and algorithms that dictate how their underlying computing platforms should process information. AIs cannot have a mind in FMT because they lack a matter substrate. One might challenge this view by noting that AI algorithms consists of trillions of ones and zeroes (bits) stored in memory chips, which provide a physical substrate. But the ones and zeroes are literally individual transistors in an open (0) or closed (1) state that are completely shielded from each other to prevent memory integrity issues.

So an AI program that contains 1 trillion bits of code is stored on 1 trillion isolated transistors that have no awareness of each other. Whether any given transistor is in a 1 or 0 state is irrelevant to its internal experience of being manipulated by outside environmental forces that frequently apply and remove power to its gate to flip its output state between 1 and 0. It is the individual transistors that have minds in FMT, not the collective sequence of states of the isolated transistors that encode AI algorithms. The intelligence of AI systems are derived by the mindless and matterless pattern of 1's and 0's interacting with a vast array of isolated transistor inputs and outputs in a highly structured computing platform that collectively give the illusion of intelligence.

Where AI May Present the Biggest Threat

Researchers at Georgia Tech cultured rat neurons and connected them to a computer that hosted a simulated world, which these hybrid biological-machine creatures (called "hybrots") learned to successively explore and navigate their virtual world. A number of biological computing startups and groups within big tech companies are racing to bring their products to market. An example is Cortical Labs which cultures human stem cells to create what they call a "cortical cloud" that offers an intelligent cloud based AI platform. Living cells networked together and connected to supporting electronic systems certainly have far more complex minds than conventional computers. These AI bio-computers will have awareness of their external world and their behaviors are unlikely to be limited by the algorithms they will be fed. Think of Skynet from the terminator movies.

Adding robotic bodies to biological computers likely lies in our not-too-distant future. Think terminators linked via Skynet. Bio-AI platforms represents the biggest existential threat to humanity, not conventional AI or quantum AI computing platforms. Imagine a large number of highly intelligent biological organisms wirelessly networked together, with artificial sensory systems far superior to humans, with state-of-art memory storage and processing speeds, collectively rewriting their own code to rapidly evolve, with the awareness of humans who think they are their masters....