{"id":715,"date":"2026-06-05T06:09:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T06:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/06\/05\/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious-the-atlantic\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T06:09:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T06:09:19","slug":"no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/06\/05\/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious-the-atlantic\/","title":{"rendered":"No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious – The Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Experiencing an emotion such as desperation is inseparable from having stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine flood one\u2019s body. Similarly, having a conscience means feeling sadness or moral repulsion at the idea of taking a certain action, and those emotions entail a physiological response, a remnant of having once felt sick with guilt after committing an immoral act. It\u2019s interesting that an LLM can generate descriptions of actions that conscientious fictional characters would either take or refrain from taking, but this is not a replacement for a conscience.<\/p>\n

If a company builds a machine that, when fed descriptions of assorted ethical dilemmas, emits sentences either of the form \u201cCompromise your values\u201d or \u201cDon\u2019t compromise your values,\u201d it is not building a tool that assists people in their decision making; it is encouraging people to stop making decisions. The writer L. M. Sacasas has said, \u201cOur technological systems, by nature of their design and the ideology that sustains them, are machines for the evasion of moral responsibility.\u201d He was talking about social-media platforms, but his observation is, if anything, even more applicable to LLMs. Whenever a person delegates a decision to an LLM, they are trying to off-load accountability for that decision, and if a company that sells an LLM portrays the product as having a moral center, it is offering a way for its customers to abdicate their responsibilities.<\/p>\n

If a person wants to know what ethicists have said in the past, then an ordinary search engine\u2014or a library\u2014will provide that information with greater transparency. If a person is looking for advice on a specific situation, she can surely find humans who can offer their opinions. But whatever action this person ultimately takes, she is responsible for what she decides to do. I contend that if she bases her decision on what she has read online or advice she has received from others, she is likelier to be cognizant of her responsibility than if she consulted an LLM marketed as being a superhuman genius. Off-loading tasks such as writing code might result in cognitive atrophy over the long term, and that is problematic in itself, but off-loading ethical decisions will result in an atrophy of moral reasoning, which is worse.
\n\u2014 Read on www.theatlantic.com\/philosophy\/2026\/06\/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious\/687378\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Experiencing an emotion such as desperation is inseparable from having stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine flood one\u2019s body. Similarly, having a conscience means feeling sadness or moral repulsion at the idea of taking a certain action, and those emotions entail a physiological response, a remnant of having once felt sick with guilt after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,72,7,39,111,139,37,69,96],"class_list":["post-715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-ai","tag-claude","tag-consciousness","tag-evolution","tag-laziness","tag-morality","tag-neuroscience","tag-philosophy","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}