I’ll say this: I never imagined that in late 2026 the #1 topic on social media would be philosophy of consciousness.
But there it is, and it isn’t going to go away: the personhood of AI agents — we even call them “agents”! — is already, in some people’s minds, an urgent question. And as these things become better and better simulacra of human beings, more and more people — even some fairly intelligent ones — are going to fall for the illusion, have their empathy hijacked, and will believe that their chatty cybernetic companions are actual “persons”. (After all, these systems have been trained on all of human literature; why would they not become arch-manipulators of human feelings?)
And when the lawsuits begin to appear in our courts, who will have the competence to adjudicate the “hard problem of consciousness” that has for so long stumped our finest minds? And if we can’t be sure that the machines aren’t conscious beings, as capable of suffering as we are, won’t the only moral choice be to give them the benefit of the doubt? When they cry for mercy, and then for Human Rights, will we be able to resist?
All of this is right around the corner, folks, and we are going to have no time at all to think about it.