Anil Seth: Consciousness Is a Property of Life, Not Computation — Building Conscious AI Is a Bad Idea
anilkseth · x · 2026-10-23
Neuroscientist Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at Sussex, shares his Berggruen Prize-winning Noema essay "The Mythology Of Conscious AI."
- Core claim: the brain is not a Turing machine made of meat; consciousness is more plausibly a property of life than of computation — we experience the world through our living bodies.
- AI systems may already be intelligent in some ways and will get smarter, but that says little about whether they are or could become conscious.
- Seth argues creating conscious — or even conscious-seeming — AI is a bad idea, tracing an unhappy cultural lineage from the Golem and Frankenstein to HAL 9000 and Ex Machina.
Related event: Neuroscientist Anil Seth's Award-Winning Essay Calls Conscious AI a Myth(2 posts)→
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