How to Navigate Uncertainty About AI Consciousness
arXiv:2608.19215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given deep uncertainty about the possibility of artificial consciousness, it is unclear how we should treat potentially sentient AI. On the one hand, we could assume insentience but risk doing terrible harms to entities that deserve moral standing. On the other hand, we could assume sentience and instead risk wasting resources on insentient machines. The intractability of questions around AI consciousness mean that this dilemma is hard to escape. I suggest a way out of that shifts from intractable questions of AI consciousness to tractable questions of AI valence. Specifically, we can assess whether an AI has states that would constitute valenced experiences if it were conscious. I show how this is sufficient to ground a responsible approach to the development of potentially conscious AI.
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[Submitted on 6 Jul 2026]
Title:How to Navigate Uncertainty About AI Consciousness
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Abstract:Given deep uncertainty about the possibility of artificial consciousness, it is unclear how we should treat potentially sentient AI. On the one hand, we could assume insentience but risk doing terrible harms to entities that deserve moral standing. On the other hand, we could assume sentience and instead risk wasting resources on insentient machines. The intractability of questions around AI consciousness mean that this dilemma is hard to escape. I suggest a way out of that shifts from intractable questions of AI consciousness to tractable questions of AI valence. Specifically, we can assess whether an AI has states that would constitute valenced experiences if it were conscious. I show how this is sufficient to ground a responsible approach to the development of potentially conscious AI.
Comments: 8 Pages, Proceedings of AISB 2026 Symposium on AI, Consciousness and Ethics
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.19215 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2608.19215v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.19215
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Tom McClelland Dr [view email] [v1] Mon, 6 Jul 2026 10:37:36 UTC (264 KB)
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