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

Three of consciousness science's most-cited figures have used a Nature comment to push back on the idea that AI systems are, or soon will be, conscious. In a 19 October piece in Nature, neuroscientist Anil K. Seth of the University of Sussex, philosopher Ned Block of NYU and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison argue that today's models are not candidates for subjective experience, and that current trajectories of AI development are unlikely to produce it.

Their first move prises apart intelligence from consciousness, which they define as "what goes away with dreamless sleep or under general anaesthesia." The human cerebellum, they note, contains "nearly four-fifths of the neurons in the human brain" and performs sophisticated computation outside conscious awareness. Large language models trigger consciousness talk mainly because they produce fluent text; they are, in the authors' phrase, "mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past." AlphaFold, which does nothing linguistic, prompts no such speculation.

The second argument takes aim at computational functionalism, the premise that running the right algorithm is enough. "Computations are clearly sufficient to produce forms of intelligence," they grant, but reject the extension to consciousness: brains, they write, are "not—or at least not just—computers that are made of meat."

The third argument reaches for specific theories. Integrated Information Theory, Tononi's own framework, requires components wired together in tightly interconnected ways that the authors say are absent from the layered, feed-forward architecture of today's deep-learning systems. Biological naturalism, which Seth has defended elsewhere, ties consciousness to electrochemical and metabolic properties specific to living nervous systems.

Their closing framing is blunt: today's AI are "smart tools, not smart people," and treating appearances of consciousness as the real thing, they warn, risks pulling welfare attention from beings whose capacity to suffer is already certain.