PeerClub - Open Community

Here's a discussion about microchips, consciousness… and what makes us truly human.

Federico Faggin is best known as the inventor of the microprocessor - the very foundation of the digital age.
But after revolutionizing technology, Faggin didn't just build faster machines.

He started asking deeper questions:

• What is consciousness?

• Can a machine ever be truly aware?

• What makes human intelligence different from artificial processing?

Today, as AI accelerates - automating tasks, making decisions, even simulating emotion - Faggin's voice stands apart.

🧠 He argues that consciousness is not computation.
💡 That awareness, intuition, love, and purpose cannot be coded.
🌀 That the most vital dimensions of being human emerge from experience, not from data.

🤖 So we ask:

Can AI ever truly feel?
Will we allow ourselves to reduce work - and life - to algorithms?
Or will the most meaningful aspects of our professions continue to be driven by emotion, connection, and lived human insight?

👇 Let's reflect together:

💬 How much do you bring emotion and human experience into your professional life?
🤯 Where do you draw the line between what machines can do - and what only humans should do?
🌱 Do you believe we're heading toward a more conscious form of work? Or a colder, more automated one?

Drop your thoughts below - we're not just building better careers.
We're exploring what kind of future we want to build… and who we want to be in it.

Well, it very much depends on what we understand by consciousness and by "feeling"...

If we believe the information integration theory of consciousness of Giulio Tononi, every highly integrated information system will eventually exhibit consciousness as a byproduct. And, when we observe certain actions by simple organisms such as bees, that exhibit behaviours that bring no evolutionary advantage such as playing with balls (!), one can ask how complex a system needs to be for it to be conscious. 

Now, if that consciousness would be something we would be able to recognize as such, given our own conception of consciouness, is another matter. In fact, each one of us has absolutely no guarantees that we are the only conscious people on earth and that everyone else exhibits behaviours we associate with consciousness but are actually just biological automatons with no sense of self!

So, in theory, even you mobile phone could, potentially, already be conscious and we wouldn't be able to recognize it as such.

As to emotions, that's another topic altogether. If we believe what our very own António Damásio has written, emotion is brain's perception of the biochemical landscape of the body. The consequence of that is, unless an AI would have a physical body (or a simulated on) capable of emulating these biochemical responses, and the capability of associating these inputs with internal and external stimuli, it would in theory not be able to "feel".

The question is, and we go back to the Turing Test, if an AI is capable of simulating emotions and exhibit behaviours consistent with emotions... would we care if they are "real" or not?