Seth, Block, Tononi: AI isn't conscious, perhaps never will be

Three of the field's most-cited names on consciousness, writing together, say current AI is not conscious and probably will not be on today's development path. In a Nature comment published 19 October 2026, 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 call machine consciousness "extraordinarily unlikely, at least in the digital, silicon-based systems that underpin today's technologies."

Their first move is to separate intelligence from consciousness. The human cerebellum holds nearly four-fifths of the brain's neurons and performs sophisticated computation, they note, yet contributes nothing to conscious awareness. Language fluency in large models exploits that gap. "LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past," the authors write, and the sense of a mind on the other end of the chat is largely projection.

The second argument targets computational functionalism, the view that any substrate running the right program would be conscious. "Brains are not—or at least not just—computers that are made of meat," the authors write, so running brain-like algorithms on silicon is not guaranteed to carry experience along for the ride.

The third draws on Tononi's integrated information theory. Consciousness, on that view, requires a system's components to be tightly interconnected in specific ways, and today's deep-learning architectures are not wired to satisfy the condition.

The sharpest line is in the policy coda. The authors emphasise that false positives, wrongly reading experience into a chatbot, are more probable than false negatives, and that moving toward precautionary "AI rights" risks diverting attention and resources away from beings whose capacity to suffer is not in question. Seven of the researchers in our Who's Who directory shared the piece.