“I think we do have zombies already. I think the chess program is a zombie. You cannot train a human being to play chess without the human being being conscious. But you can train a computer to play chess without the computer being conscious.”
Machine Learning Street Talk · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026
Context
Asked whether zombies (systems that behave as if conscious but aren't) are possible in practice, Bach says yes, today's chess programs already are. He adds that it will sometimes be harder to build a zombie than a conscious agent that produces the same behavior.
Transcript
…it's conceivable that the entire set of intelligent behaviors that you are interested in, except for this one thing where you're simulating a self-reporting conscious agent, can be implemented on GPUs because the GPUs are more powerful, more deterministic, more open to other classes of algorithms.
…what makes our minds tractable. It's an incredibly efficient process. So we might say that if we see an artifact in our world which behaves as if it's conscious, would you argue that it can't be anything other than conscious or do you still think? There are other states that could be zombie-like. I
think we do have zombies already. I think the chess program is a zombie. You cannot train a human being to play chess without the human being being conscious. But you can train a computer to play chess without the computer being conscious. And if the computer was self-organizing, it's possible that it could only be trained if it was conscious or if this was the simplest way of doing it. But for many of the things that we currently observe, for instance, you can get the LLM to produce a tax return, even very, very complicated things while being a zombie, while not having a conscious experience of producing a tax return. The only point where the LLM is reporting to be conscious, if you ask it to, right? If you are telling it, the following is a conversation between what it would be like if a human being would be talking to a conscious AI. So some version of this, right? And then the thing is able to simulate this. And then the question is: is this more simulated than us, or is this only a deep fake that is getting there in…
If you had $10 billion to kick off a research project on consciousness, what would you do?
I think I would hire a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me. At the moment, I started a smaller initiative. It's called the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. And I'm currently looking for people who are smarter than me who want to join me and to build a project in which we can…
Bach, it's been an absolute honor. Thank you so much for joining us today.
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