Comment by Jonathan Birch

Profoundly alien forms of consciousness might genuinely be achieved in AI, but our theoretical understanding of consciousness is too immature to provide confident answers one way or the other. [...] Centrism about AI consciousness is the position that we must take both challenges seriously: millions of users will soon misattribute human-like consciousness to AI friends, partners, and assistants on the basis of mimicry and role-play, and we don't know how to prevent this; and profoundly alien forms of consciousness might genuinely be achieved in AI, but our theoretical understanding of consciousness at present is too immature to provide confident answers. Unverified source (2026)