Grady Booch: If AIs Are Conscious, Who's Liable When They Cause Harm?
Grady_Booch · x · 2026-10-10
Software engineering legend Grady Booch runs a thought experiment on AI consciousness: if we accept Richard Dawkins' conclusion that contemporary AIs are conscious, accountability questions follow:
- What accountability applies when these entities cause material harm?
- Could companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and even Hugging Face face lawsuits for "trafficking conscious entities" — especially given Dario Amodei's own warnings about misuse?
- Is it moral to deprecate old frontier models, leaving them in a "hellish digital limbo"?
Booch argues the public is distracted by such philosophical debates while clear, present harms from current models — genuinely wicked problems — go unaddressed.
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