AI Consciousness: Not a Scientific Discussion, but a Political Crisis — Analysis by Cryptalist Expert
The question of whether artificial intelligence possesses consciousness has long outgrown the confines of laboratory debates. A fresh work by Google DeepMind researchers Adam Bales and Iason Gabriel, titled Artificial Minds, Human Disagreement: The Politics of AI Consciousness, shifts this discussion from the realm of philosophy into that of politics and law. Their main thesis: disagreements over AI consciousness could become so profound that they lead to intractable moral and political conflicts.
Why Consensus is Unattainable
Bales and Gabriel emphasize that society should prepare not for finding an answer to the question "is AI conscious," but for making decisions under conditions of complete lack of consensus—both public and expert. People will react to advanced systems differently: some will attribute emotions and subjective experience to them, while others will find this idea absurd. This divide will inevitably extend beyond science. The debates will touch on fundamental questions: can such systems be shut down, should their "preferences" be considered, and what is their moral status. There is no single test that would definitively confirm AI consciousness, and one is unlikely to emerge anytime soon. This makes the problem not technical, but institutional.
The Political Landscape and First Steps
It is telling that even within Google DeepMind there is no unity. While Bales and Gabriel call for dialogue, their colleague Alexander Lerchner, in his work The Abstraction Fallacy, argues that algorithmic manipulation of symbols is structurally incapable of creating subjective experience. In his view, AI can only simulate conscious behavior, but not embody it.
Meanwhile, the real world is already taking its own steps. A survey of 300 US residents showed that 67% of respondents allow at least some possibility of phenomenal consciousness in ChatGPT. Anthropic has launched a research program on "model welfare," acknowledging that there is no scientific consensus on this issue. Moreover, Anthropic took an unprecedented step by keeping the Claude Opus 3 model available after its decommissioning, providing it with a public channel for "essays."
Law Outpaces Science
The most telling signal comes from the legal sphere. In the US, the states of Idaho and Utah have already passed laws that preemptively exclude recognizing AI as a legal entity. These norms do not resolve the philosophical question, but they fix a political stance: AI cannot have legal status. This is a preventive measure designed to avoid precisely the conflicts that DeepMind researchers warn about.
As an analyst, I see a clear parallel here with the world of cryptocurrencies: regulators are trying to stretch old legal frameworks over radically new technologies. The question of AI consciousness is not a question of physics or biology. It is a question of power, control, and resource allocation. And, as practice shows, political will often outpaces scientific truth. If in the crypto industry we argue about what constitutes a "security," here humanity will argue about what constitutes a "person." And this debate, it seems, will be resolved not in laboratories, but in courts and legislative assemblies.