Demis Hassabis on AI consciousness: "I don't think we are ready yet as a society"
TorturedPoet30 · reddit · 2026-11-06
In a Masters of Scale Summit interview, Demis Hassabis flagged a question often lost in AI consciousness debates: not whether AI can be conscious, but whether we've ever decided we want to create conscious AI.
He worries this raises questions society is nowhere near agreeing on—moral standing for such systems, what we'd owe them—and notes that after thousands of years of thinking, we still lack an agreed definition of consciousness (he's a neuroscientist by training).
His proposed path: build intelligent tools first, use them to advance neuroscience and understand consciousness better, then revisit whether and how to create conscious systems. The full 5-minute discussion is in the linked video.
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