Goalposts

Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?

2026 Junevmg12

About Ted Chiang's argument that artificial intelligence is not conscious.

People are constantly talking past eachother when they discuss this. Is there even a concrete definition of consciousness?

When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence.

Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitrarily long times. It has no understanding of its own capabilities until the prompt triggers them. A self aware LLM would understand it's an LLM, it would understand what LLM's can and cannot do and what they are good and bad at. It wouldn't tell you a refactor would take 1 week when an LLM can do it in an hour.

An AI accurately knows what LLMs can and cannot do, e.g. estimating how long a task will take it.

Has this happened?

Yes 29 (24%)Not sure 34 (28%)No 58 (48%)

Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.