内容摘要：It said its officers were committed to attending and investigating burglaries and urged the public to continue reporting them.

It said its officers were committed to attending and investigating burglaries and urged the public to continue reporting them.

According to Prof Shanahan, it's important for tech firms to get a proper understanding of the systems they're building – and researchers are looking at that as a matter of urgency."We are in a strange position of building these extremely complex things, where we don't have a good theory of exactly how they achieve the remarkable things they are achieving," he says. "So having a better understanding of how they work will enable us to steer them in the direction we want and to ensure that they are safe."

The prevailing view in the tech sector is that LLMs are not currently conscious in the way we experience the world, and probably not in any way at all. But that is something that the married couple Profs Lenore and Manuel Blum, both emeritus professors at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, believe will change, possibly quite soon.According to the Blums, that could happen as AI and LLMs have more live sensory inputs from the real world, such as vision and touch, by connecting cameras and haptic sensors (related to touch) to AI systems. They are developing a computer model that constructs its own internal language called Brainish to enable this additional sensory data to be processed, attempting to replicate the processes that go on in the brain."We think Brainish can solve the problem of consciousness as we know it," Lenore tells the BBC. "AI consciousness is inevitable."

Manuel chips in enthusiastically with an impish grin, saying that the new systems that he too firmly believes will emerge will be the "next stage in humanity's evolution".Conscious robots, he believes, "are our progeny. Down the road, machines like these will be entities that will be on Earth and maybe on other planets when we are no longer around".

David Chalmers – Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University – defined the distinction between real and apparent consciousness at a conference in Tucson, Arizona in 1994. He laid out the "hard problem" of working out how and why any of the complex operations of brains give rise to conscious experience, such as our emotional response when we hear a nightingale sing.

Prof Chalmers says that he is open to the possibility of the hard problem being solved.The EU's foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, says the alliance has not imposed "the strongest sanctions" on Russian oil and gas because some member states fear an escalation in the conflict and because buying them is "cheaper in the short term".

LNG imports have not been included in the latest, 17th package of sanctions on Russia approved by the EU, buttowards ending all Russian gas imports by the end of 2027.

Data shows that money made by Russia from selling fossil fuels has consistently surpassed the amount of aid Ukraine receives from its allies.The thirst for fuel can get in the way of the West's efforts to limit Russia's ability to fund its war.