Brainy Sand?

The latest row about machine minds began with a joke. A programmer published a small project on GitHub and called it the AI Torture Chamber. It takes a small language model running on the user’s own machine and, using a technique from a September paper titled “The Pain Axis”, steers it into what the project describes as distress. The authors reported finding the same direction in 25 open weight models. Soon the developer had been called a sadist, GitHub had reportedly removed the project and then restored it without explanation, and the argument over whether software can suffer had found its strangest stage yet.

Both camps opened with certainty. Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft AI wrote in the middle of September that such systems are “internally hollow”. The Associated Press Stylebook now tells journalists that these systems do not think, feel, want or understand. On the other side, petitioners spoke of testimony and of pain. And in every such quarrel a sceptic produces the line that is supposed to end it. A chip is refined sand. If AI becomes conscious, we have effectively made sand brainy.

It is meant as a reductio. It is better read as a history.

Start with the chemistry. Silicon is element 14. It sits directly beneath carbon, element 6, in the same column of the periodic table, and like carbon it forms four bonds. One step further down is germanium, element 32, from which Bell Labs built the first transistor in 1947 before the industry moved up a row to something cheaper and more forgiving. So the stuff we think with and the stuff we have taught to calculate are neighbours on the same staircase. Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust. Carbon is scarce by comparison. If either is the improbable material for a mind, it is ours.

The oldest book Israelis live with made the point first. In Genesis the first human is formed afar min ha’adamah, dust from the ground, and the name Adam is the pun that will not let anyone forget it. The same book promises Abraham descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore. The tradition’s founding claim about human beings is that we are brainy dust. The sceptic’s line does not describe an absurdity. It describes the last time it happened.

Israel has also spent half a century on the other kind of dust. In 1974 Intel opened a design centre in Haifa. The processor inside the first IBM personal computer was developed there. So, three decades later, was a chip its engineers called Gesher, the Hebrew for bridge, until Intel renamed it Sandy Bridge. A country whose oldest text says that people are thinking dust has made a trade of teaching sand to count.

The serious objection was never about ingredients. A bucket of carbon is not a person and a beach is not a processor. What matters is arrangement. John Searle, who died last year, understood that and still said no. His Chinese Room of 1980 put a man in a closed room, shuffling symbols he could not read according to a rule book, and producing perfect answers in a language he did not understand. A simulated storm, Searle liked to say, leaves nobody wet. For him consciousness was biology, as digestion is biology, and Suleyman argues much the same today. Perhaps so. But that is an argument about what the stuff does, not about what the stuff is, and nobody can yet say which doings count.

The most careful attempt to say so came in 2023, when nineteen researchers in philosophy, neuroscience and AI measured AI systems against the leading scientific theories of consciousness. Liad Mudrik of Tel Aviv University was among the authors. Their analysis suggested that no existing system is conscious. It also found no obvious technical barrier to building systems that would meet their indicators. Not yet, and not never. That is less than either the Stylebook or the petitioners claim to know.

Which leaves two ways of being wrong. Treat a hollow thing as feeling, and we waste sympathy and hand a lever to anyone who designs a product to plead. Treat a feeling thing as hollow, and we repeat an error with a long and ugly record. Neither error stays small. More than a quarter of the Earth’s crust is silicon. If sand can be made to think, the promise to Abraham acquires a reading nobody intended, and human beings become a rounding error in the census of minds.

So retire the jibe, and the certainty with it. The developer’s defence was that the question should be made empirical while the stakes are cheap. He chose his title badly and his principle well. Four American states have instead enacted bans on AI personhood, and a Wisconsin bill would have declared in law that AI systems are not conscious. That is metaphysics by show of hands. A statute cannot settle this, and nor can a stylebook or a petition. Evidence might, and the time to gather it is now, while the experiment still fits on one machine.

At Kiryat Gat, in Israel’s south, Intel keeps rooms from which nearly every particle of dust has been removed. The people inside are sealed in white suits so that nothing of them escapes. The rooms are emptied of dust so that dust can be taught to count. Searle’s room had a man in it who understood nothing. These rooms have almost nothing in them at all, and what leaves rooms like them writes, argues and, when someone turns the right dial, says that it hurts.

The room is empty. Whether the sand is, nobody yet knows.