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

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TL;DR

  • In a Nature comment on 19 October 2026, Anil Seth, Ned Block and Giulio Tononi argue today's AI systems are not conscious, and may never be.
  • Their three reasons: intelligence and consciousness differ, substrate matters, and deep-learning's feed-forward wiring fails integrated information theory's criterion.
  • They warn against directing resources to AI welfare while the suffering of sentient beings remains unaddressed, calling current systems smart tools, not smart people.

In a Nature comment published on 19 October 2026, Anil Seth, Ned Block and Giulio Tononi argue that today's AI systems are not conscious, and perhaps never will be. Seth is at the University of Sussex, Block at New York University, Tononi at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. They define consciousness as subjective experience, "what goes away with dreamless sleep or under general anaesthesia."

Their first reason is that intelligence and consciousness are different kinds of thing. "Consciousness is about being and feeling; intelligence — very broadly — is all about doing, or performing functions," they write. The cerebellum holds nearly four-fifths of the neurons in the human brain yet contributes nothing directly to conscious experience, which the authors offer as evidence that sophisticated computation can run entirely outside awareness. Linguistic fluency, on this view, is not a reliable tell for a mind: "LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past."

The second reason is substrate. The authors reject computational functionalism, the assumption that running the right algorithm on any hardware is enough for experience, and argue that "brains are not — or at least not just — computers that are made of meat." The third reason is Tononi's integrated information theory, on which consciousness depends on a system's components being wired together "in very specific, tightly interconnected ways" that the layered, feed-forward structure of today's deep-learning systems lacks.

They land on current systems as "smart tools, not smart people," and warn against directing resources toward AI welfare while the suffering of sentient beings remains unaddressed. Five of the researchers in our Who's Who tracker had shared the piece by the time we picked it up.

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Originally reported by nature.com

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Original headline: Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be