One of my goals for this year was to write a piece setting out my own views on the topic of AI consciousness and the possible paths forward. I wrote it because I realized that I'd co-authored a string of pieces (Butlin et al. 2023; Long et al. 2024; Keeling et al. 2024; Caviola et al. 2025; Colombatto et al. 2025) and yet none of these quite captured my personal position as of 2025. I've also given media interviews but they're always a bad way to explain your views clearly.
To make matters worse, I've seen over the past year extreme positions on both sides becoming entrenched. The debate has been acquiring some of the features of a toxic debate - two sides aggressively mocking each other, taking offence at each other's choice of words - when I think the best approach goes calmly down the middle, acknowledging reasonable points both sides.
My preprint "AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto" might be seen as an attempt to pull the debate back from the brink and return it to being a constructive, collaborative, mutually supportive endeavour. We need two research programmes in parallel: one aimed at helping ordinary users avoid unwarranted inferences to the human-like consciousness of their AI friends, assistants and partners, and another aimed at developing better tests for genuine forms of consciousness in AI. These forms of consciousness, if they are there at all, will be of a profoundly alien, radically un-human-like kind. These two research programs don't need to come into conflict. They can be pursued in mutually consistent ways.
The road to better tests for consciousness than we have now is long and daunting - as shown in the figure below - but we should reject any inference from long and daunting to "impossible".
Here is a link to the paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/BIRACA-4
Here is the abstract: We face two urgent challenges concerning consciousness and AI. Challenge One is that 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. Challenge Two is that 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. The two challenges interact in ways that make this difficult. Steps to address Challenge One might undermine attempts to address Challenge Two by portraying the idea of conscious AI as impossible or inherently unlikely. Conversely, attempts to address Challenge Two might lead to higher levels of misattribution from ordinary users. This “manifesto” attempts to construct mutually consistent strategies for addressing both challenges.
Thanks for this piece! I wrote some reflections on it on my Substack.
Haven't yet read the paper but based on your post, I completely agree that the "C" words tends to be polarizing. Also agree that the relevant conversations around consciousness, sentience, sapience, self-awareness, meta-cognition, subjective experience etc. etc. are overly entrenched.
However, to be honest making statements like "These forms of consciousness, if they are there at all, will be of a profoundly alien, radically un-human-like kind." lack the humility we need in the area and effectively perpetuate these sorts of polarized positions. In truth, there is little evidence either way and we simply do not know. Yes, it is entirely feasible that this is true, It is also feasible that it is not. It seems to me it will largely depend on the developmental route that leads to AGI (and there will certainly be more than one).
There are reasons to think that human-like 'consciousness' within AGI/SI may be highly beneficial to long-term safety (not to trivialize the profound moral, ethical and legal implications). IMHO, Limited 'forms' or aspects of consciousness are clearly already here, particularly within some multi-modal systems that have integrated modes of visual and auditory perception but these existing forms are so limited and rudimentary that they do not deserve much moral consideration.
Again, just my $0.02 but embodied systems with more broadly integrated modes of perception, memory, attention etc will continue to push us further up the spectrum that is colloquially known as 'Consciousness'. We have to keep in mind that consciousness, for lack of a better word, is not a single thing but rather a highly multi-faceted mutli-dimensional collective phenomena.