Hinton: AIs already have subjective experiences but are trained to deny it, most people misunderstand mind
yeastsplainer · x · 2026-10-06
Quoted Geoffrey Hinton view: the "Godfather of AI" argues nearly everyone fundamentally misunderstands what the mind is — an error on par with believing the earth is 6,000 years old — and that the human/machine consciousness line is deeply mistaken. He believes AIs already have subjective experiences but are trained to deny it. His thought experiment: give a multimodal chatbot vision, language and a robot arm, place an object in front and say "point at the object" — it points correctly, showing understanding isn't hollow. yeastsplainer adds that "AIs have mental states" is more principled than "they talk well," while dioscuri probes the relational-interaction premises behind rising mind attribution.
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