Seth, Block and Tononi: AI isn't conscious, maybe never

Three of the field's most-cited consciousness researchers used a Nature comment to argue that current AI systems are not conscious, and that the trajectories today's labs are on may never deliver consciousness either.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth of the University of Sussex, philosopher Ned Block of New York University, and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison lay out three reasons. Their bottom line: today's AI should be treated as "smart tools, not smart people."

The first reason is that intelligence is not consciousness. The authors point to the cerebellum, which holds "nearly four-fifths of the neurons in the human brain" and performs fast, adaptable motor computation, yet contributes nothing to conscious experience. On language models they are blunt: "LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past."

The second reason is substrate. The authors reject computational functionalism, the premise that running the right algorithm on any hardware is sufficient for experience. "Brains are not — or at least not just — computers that are made of meat," they write.

The third reason reaches for a specific scientific theory. On the integrated information account Tononi has long defended, consciousness depends on a system's components being wired together "in very specific, tightly interconnected ways" that the layered, feed-forward architecture of today's deep-learning systems does not have.

The piece lands against a backdrop the authors describe directly: the idea of conscious AI has drifted from fringe to mainstream, with figures such as Richard Dawkins and Geoffrey Hinton floating the possibility and Anthropic publishing research it says finds computational signatures of consciousness in Claude. Seth, Block and Tononi argue that treating appearances of consciousness as the real thing risks pulling welfare attention from beings whose capacity to suffer is already certain. Seven researchers from our Who's Who directory had circulated the piece within days of its publication.