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“People Will Soon Disagree about Whether AI Is Sentient, and That’s a Moral Disaster”

Leading consciousness researchers have predicted that, within a decade or so, some AI systems will likely meet the criteria for sentience according to some of the more liberal mainstream theories of consciousness. Thus, it will likely soon be reasonable to wonder whether some of our most sophisticated AI systems might be sentient. This will create troubling moral dilemmas about our ethical duties to such systems. Can we ethically delete them? Must we give them rights? Eric Schwitzgebel will argue that to the extent possible, we should avoid creating AI systems of unclear moral status.

Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, specializing in consciousness, philosophy of mind and moral psychology. His books include Describing Inner Experience? (2007), Perplexities of Consciousness (2011), A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures (2019), and The Weirdness of the World (2024).