内容摘要：Approximately 5,400 police were deployed across Paris in anticipation of the raucous celebrations.

Approximately 5,400 police were deployed across Paris in anticipation of the raucous celebrations.

But what really is consciousness, and how close is AI to gaining it? And could the belief that AI might be conscious itself fundamentally change humans in the next few decades?The idea of machines with their own minds has long been explored in science fiction. Worries about AI stretch back nearly a hundred years to the film Metropolis, in which a robot impersonates a real woman.

A fear of machines becoming conscious and posing a threat to humans is explored in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the HAL 9000 computer attacks astronauts onboard its spaceship. And in the final Mission Impossible film, which has just been released, the world is threatened by a powerful rogue AI, described by one character as a "self-aware, self-learning, truth-eating digital parasite".But quite recently, in the real world there has been a rapid tipping point in thinking on machine consciousness, where credible voices have become concerned that this is no longer the stuff of science fiction.The sudden shift has been prompted by the success of so-called large language models (LLMs), which can be accessed through apps on our phones such as Gemini and Chat GPT. The ability of the latest generation of LLMs to have plausible, free-flowing conversations has surprised even their designers and some of the leading experts in the field.

There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious.Others, such as Prof Anil Seth who leads the Sussex University team, disagree, describing the view as "blindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism".

"We associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go together in humans. But just because they go together in us, it doesn't mean they go together in general, for example in animals."

So what actually is consciousness?Then every two years a choir, made up of children from two partnership schools, are brought over to Bristol to spend three weeks performing and sharing their talent and culture.

"They've been busking, they've put on concerts," he said.Mr Knight explained the tour aimed to raise money for the two schools involved.

"They are over here sharing their extraordinary talents and culture but also earning money to develop their educational opportunities back home," he said.He said this year, one school planned to use the money to develop solar energy and the other hoped to buy IT equipment.