If AI becomes conscious, how would we treat it? Animals may hold a clue.

View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed If AI becomes conscious, how would we treat it? Our beliefs about AI consciousness may depend less on evidence and more on self-interest. PhilosophyMind and BehaviorArtificial IntelligenceEthicsConsciousness Consciousness remains the deepest puzzle in human science.

Even as we begin to understand how the brain processes information, we remain as far as ever from understanding why any of that processing should feel like anything from the inside. That mystery is what drew me into consciousness research, and over time I came to think the puzzle was as much a moral one as a metaphysical one. Consciousness is what makes things matter.

Pains that don’t hurt aren’t pains, and joy that goes unfelt isn’t joy. Without consciousness, paradise and torment may as well be the same thing. This has real implications, most notably in our treatment of animals.

As David Foster Wallace famously wondered, when we immerse a live lobster in a pot of boiling water, are its seemingly desperate attempts to escape the reflex movements of an unthinking biological automaton, or is there a sentient being inside spending its last moments in agony? The underlying hope is that the science of consciousness might drive not just ethical insight but also changes in our behavior toward animals, allowing us to determine the precise boundaries of sentience and set the circumference of our moral circle accordingly. This optimistic mission is complicated by the rise of a different type of nonhuman intelligence: increasingly sophisticated machines.

An early harbinger of this came in June 2022, when Google employee Blake Lemoine went public with claims that an AI he had been conversing with was sentient. He even went so far as to seek legal representation for the system. Lemoine may have jumped the gun, but a growing number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and AI researchers began to pay closer attention to the possibility that conscious machines might be around the corner.

In 2023, a report led by philosophers Patrick Butlin and Robert Long and coauthored by many leading consciousness researchers assessed AI systems against indicators drawn from prominent scientific theories of consciousness. It concluded that although no current system appeared conscious, there were “no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.” > How is it that we can care for animals and believe they feel pain, yet have little inclination to stop eating them? Since then, a flurry of philosophical and scientific papers has sought to assess how each generation of AI systems stacks up.