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

Three of the field's most prominent consciousness researchers used a Nature comment on 19 October to argue that current AI systems are not conscious, and that present trajectories are unlikely to make them so. The authors are Anil Seth of the University of Sussex, Ned Block of New York University, and Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Their case rests on three claims. First, intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. "Consciousness is about being and feeling; intelligence — very broadly — is all about doing, or performing functions," they write, pointing to the human cerebellum, which contains nearly four-fifths of the neurons in the human brain yet whose removal does not affect consciousness directly.

Second, they reject the premise that running the right program on silicon suffices for experience. "Brains are not — or at least not just — computers that are made of meat," they write.

Third, they appeal to two frameworks, integrated information theory and biological naturalism, to argue that today's deep-learning architectures lack the specific wiring and the specific material properties each framework treats as constitutive of experience.

The closing warning is cultural rather than technical. "LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past. We gaze into them and all too readily confuse the reflections with our own conscious minds," the authors write, naming Richard Dawkins and Geoffrey Hinton among those who have entertained AI consciousness, and framing today's systems as "smart tools, not smart people." Seven researchers in our Who's Who tracker posted the piece in its first days, which is unusual traction for a commentary rather than a paper.