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

Three leading consciousness researchers argue in Nature that today's AI systems are not conscious, and perhaps never will be. The joint essay, published 19 October 2026, is signed by Anil Seth of the University of Sussex, Ned Block of New York University and Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Their opening move pulls intelligence and consciousness apart. 'Consciousness is about being and feeling,' they write; intelligence is about what a system can do. They point to the human cerebellum, which holds nearly four-fifths of the neurons in the brain and performs 'precise, adaptive, highly intelligent motor computations entirely outside conscious awareness.' Fluent output, in other words, is not evidence of a felt point of view, which is why people project a mind onto chatbots but not onto AlphaFold.

The second reason is about substrate. The authors reject computational functionalism, the view that consciousness is a matter of the right algorithm on any hardware. The composition of the biological brain, they argue, is doing something that cannot be reproduced simply by rearranging transistors.

The third reason reaches into the leading scientific theories of consciousness themselves. On Tononi's integrated information theory, consciousness requires a system's components 'to be tightly interconnected in specific ways.' Deep-learning architectures fall short of that bar 'because of the way in which they are wired.' Along the way, the authors reduce today's chatbots to one image: 'LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past.'

Their bottom line is deliberately dry: 'today's silicon-based AI systems should be treated as objects rather than subjects.' Seven of the researchers tracked in our Who's Who directory had already circulated the Nature link.