The Mirror Test: How Would We Even Know If AI Woke Up?
In 1970 a psychologist named Gordon Gallup anesthetized a chimpanzee and painted a small red mark above one of her eyes, where she could never see it directly. She had spent days living with a mirror, and when she woke and caught her reflection, she did the thing that made history. She reached up and touched her own brow. Nothing before that gesture counted as laboratory evidence that a nonhuman animal could recognize itself. Half a century later, the question has changed species. The new candidates live in data centers, speak fluently, and pass our oldest behavioral tests, and the chimpanzee’s red mark turns out to be the best available guide to how much a passed test can tell us. ...