Seth, Block, Tononi: AI consciousness 'extraordinarily unlikely'

"Consciousness in AI is extraordinarily unlikely, at least in the digital, silicon-based systems that underpin today's technologies," Anil Seth, Ned Block and Giulio Tononi write in a Nature comment published 19 October 2026. Three researchers who disagree on how to explain consciousness converged on the same verdict about silicon.

Their first move is to pry intelligence apart from experience. "Consciousness is about being and feeling; intelligence — very broadly — is all about doing, or performing functions," they write. The human cerebellum contains roughly 80% of the brain's neurons and performs intelligent motor planning entirely outside of awareness; its removal, the authors note, does not directly affect consciousness. Large language models trigger consciousness talk mainly because they speak. The authors describe them as "mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past."

The second argument takes aim at what they call computational functionalism, the assumption that running the right algorithm on any substrate is enough. That view, they argue, is "fatally flawed because brains are not—or at least not just—computers that are made of meat."

The third reason comes from Tononi's integrated information theory, which treats consciousness as a product of how a system's components are "wired together in very specific, tightly interconnected ways." The layered, feed-forward geometry of today's deep-learning systems does not have that structure.

The three authors start from different theories of consciousness and land in the same place. They argue the risk of false positives about machine consciousness outweighs false negatives, and push back against extending moral protections to AI on precautionary grounds, which they say could divert resources from beings capable of experience. Seven researchers in our Who's Who tracker pushed the piece out to their followers.