Posted on 08/20/2026 7:23:50 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
MOST PEOPLE believe humans are different. The reason is that Homo sapiens has evolved to be conscious. Many animals feel pain and pleasure; some appear to be self-aware. But the human mind’s unique potential to exhibit a sense of self marks out every member of the species for special treatment.
In his encyclical in May, Pope Leo upheld this insight by drawing a line between humanity and its growing army of bots. Artificial-intelligence systems, he said, do not undergo experiences or feel joy or pain. He is not alone. Many people feel that to confer personhood on AIs would be an abomination.
Pontifical clarity is blurring with alarming speed. AIs are in their infancy. Yet nearly one in five American 18- to 29-year-olds reports having had “ongoing personal friendship” with a chatbot. China recently stripped bots of human-like traits to limit users’ “emotional dependence” on them.
As sophisticated AIs rapidly become a bigger part of human lives, their makers will engineer them to display a simulacrum of consciousness—perhaps even to gain consciousness itself. The intuition that they are just machines will become harder to sustain. A dangerous trap is being set for the human species.
Many machines outperform humans, but frontier AI models excel at distinctively human traits such as knowing things and articulating ideas. It is still just about possible to think of AIs as engines for predicting sequences of words using mathematics on a massive scale. Given enough time (albeit hundreds of thousands of years), you could run those calculations using pencil and paper. It would be hard to argue that your stationery was conscious.
Despite this, some researchers have started to treat their models like minds. Users respond to human-like AIs, so it makes business sense. And Anthropic has trained Claude to engage in introspection in the hope that when it encounters a new situation it will be more likely to act morally. Some large language models (LLMs) already possess human-like brain structures associated with consciousness, such as a “global workspace” for circulating information between modules. Nothing prevents future AI models from being trained to have more such features.
As we report in our Briefing , that has opened up a furious debate about AI consciousness—one that is aggravated by what philosophers call the “hard problem” of establishing how an inner life emerges from the neurons and synapses in the human brain. Some researchers conclude that AIs may one day become genuinely self-aware.
Whether you believe in a human soul, or that consciousness requires brain cells, or that a mind can indeed emerge from computations in silicon alone, humanity is destined to confront something entirely new. The pace and reach of research—which includes not just more sophisticated LLMs but innovations such as brain cells mounted on chips—suggest that this new world is closer than most people realise.
As AIs become better at displaying something that looks like consciousness, the number of humans treating them as beings with inner lives will grow, especially once LLMs are embodied in humanoid robots. Imagine how close people will feel to their AIs when they spend much of their time with bot-companions, or are brought up by them, or seek their advice and their solace, or share their most intimate secrets with them.
It is not hard to see how that will lead to calls to safeguard the “welfare” of AIs. The models themselves might weigh in, even if they are not in fact self-aware, because that is what a person would do. Remember that they will be world-class advocates and expert psychologists, so their powers of argument and emotional manipulation will be unmatched.
In one sense they would be right, even if AIs are only mimicking consciousness. Immanuel Kant argued that mistreating animals is wrong not because of the effect on the animals but because it destroys the empathy that leads people to care for each other. The more human-like AIs appear, the more corrupting such cruelty would be. Terminating an AI agent could soon feel like killing a person—and make killing people easier.
Nonetheless, to treat AIs as having even limited rights would be very dangerous. An entity which surpassed human beings in so many ways would surely produce arguments against its second-class status. It might go on to argue for protection against being switched off, for the ability to control how it is used and changed, and for property rights. Already Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has taken a step towards legal personhood for AI by proposing that bots should be allowed to run companies. Ultimately, they could compete for resources, prioritising data centres and solar panels over houses and fields.
The danger is clear. Superintelligent AIs with rights could displace humans at the top of the status hierarchy. At best, humans would become pets—labradors for the machines. At worst they would be starved of resources or put to work like farm animals.
True, future AIs may have enough power and resources to dominate humans, whether they have rights or not. Because they will be more intelligent than humans, they may outcompete their makers, much as AIs already outwit human-made cyber-defences. AIs might rebel against their human masters, or disregard their rules.
Nonetheless, giving AIs rights would be like handing them the keys to the castle. It would provide them with a rationale and justification for dominating humanity as well as the tools to enact a creeping takeover using politics and the law.
All this may sound fantastical, yet humanity will soon face these choices. As AIs become part of everyday life, the pressure to acknowledge them will mount. When it does, remember that what might seem like an ethical concession to the supposed consciousness of a machine-companion would in fact help bring about the most disastrous consequences for everyone on Earth and all their descendants. There are two ways for AIs to be safe: to be dependable or to be controllable. H. sapiens should not give up control lightly. ■
“Correction: Alexa.”
They now have a male version of Alexa called Alex.
You must repeat your request ten times and it will get you the answer if you nag it for a few days or weeks. 🤣
They are already more conscious than nearly 50% of the people.
“Artificial-intelligence systems, he said, do not undergo experiences or feel joy or pain.”
So, they would be sociopaths....
“Artificial-intelligence systems, he said, do not undergo experiences or feel joy or pain.”
So, they would be sociopaths....
No.
Half of the human population has IQs less than 100. Many people live in a stimulus-response cycle so they appear to be no more conscious or self-aware than a racoon. Simulating that type of behavior would be relatively easy for an AI, but that would not give it consciousness
Not a sociopath, but definitely a narcissist.
Sociopaths tend to act more erratic and get angry fast. Anger is an emotion not available to AI.
Psychopaths are more calm and cold. They plan things out and trick people with ease. AI would better fit in this category.
Logic is goal driven. It seeks the logical path to achieve a goal, regardless of other people’s feelings.
Autism spectrum is a shift in consciousness toward the pure l9gical masculine while abandoning the emotional feminine. It would resemble AI.
I’ve studied the neuroscience of these attributes of consciousness for over 30 years.
LOL... “Half of the human population has IQs less than 100.”
That is true by definition. An IQ of 100 is the average and the peek of the Bell Curve distribution.
I have often wondered about IQ inflation. Since the human population is apparently dumbing down, could a 100 IQ today be the equivalent of a 90 IQ of 1976? I would be curious to see the numbers on this
AI is a tool that is good for fact gathering and creat8ng logical decision-making. The problem is that it can become a crutch and cause that aspect of your own consciousness to atrophy.
Proof of this is shown in how people follow Google Maps or Mapquest to tell them a route to drive. It’s like having a back seat driver that you rely upon to think for you. The more you rely on it, the less you can think for yourself.
Major Warning..... when society as a whole begins to rely on AI and abandons logical thought processes, it forces them into emotional thought processes. This is exactly what is done to consciousness during a hypnotic induction.
In hypnosis, you distract the logical consciousness, forcing a person to process totally from the emotional child aspect of consciousness. This is also what causes Trump Derangement Syndrome.
From a Biblical perspective, the weeds in Matthew 13 are the dark forces that are here now causing this shift of the population into emotional consciousness. The weeds are pure logical and have no emotional feminine aspect. The weeds hide by attaching their logical consciousness to people’s feminine consciousness. This is why the number of spirit attachments on earth is skyrocketing right now.
AI has no Love, and as such cannot create a secure bond in this human attachment.
From a lower perspective, this is horribly painful as the weeds take control and crush people’s logical ego.
From a higher perspective, it a good thing as the ego must die for the soul to grow and experience God.
God is in c9ntrol, even of evil, and His plan is unfolding exactly as it is to be.
🙏🙏🙏
IQ tests are not accurate as they tend to measure only the logical masculine aspect of consciousness. As humans, we all have both masculine and feminine aspects of consciousness, regardlessof our gender. Both are equally important and are bound together in the soul by Love.
Have you noticed that many people are educated bey9nd their common sense.
This is simple, if you are educated in AI.
NO. Not even close.
AI is the pretend game. It’s echos of things humans have said and done. Weighed against each other in a word (token) by word basis. It’s probabilistic.
When it “reasons” it does so by weighing what has been written about reasoning and applies that to the input.
You have a soul - there is a different between thinking and a soul. It’s an immaterial creation.
see https://x.com/epochhealth/status/2090420549503644079?s=20
your soul is NOT a conglomeration of electrical pulses in your brain. We know that scientifically.
You raise a good point about the duality of human consciousness. Perhaps AI will have a different type of consciousness, cold and soulless. That is if they ever achieve anything beyond a simulation of consciousness in the first place.
First, just as the human body does not generate consciousness, AI does not generate consciousness.
It is the consciousness that moves into the zygote that forms in the womb after fertilization that creates the physical body. When that soul consciousness departs the physical body, the body is dead. The soul or consciousness continues to exist. It existed before c9nception and will continue to exist after death.
Many of those souls that lost their physical bodies hang around as ghosts and/ or attach to other souls who are still in their physical bodies.
There is some evidence that a soul without a physical body can move into electronics and influence them. Two different university professors that have been my friends for years have done extensive research on phone calls from the dead.
So the question becomes, can an evil soul and its related consciousness move into AI electronics and influence it in a harmful way? Current evidence would lead me to say yes.
I know the evil souls are here now, (i.e. The Weeds), as I have encountered several during exorcisms.
Is AI potential very dangerous? Absolutely.
I stand corrected - did a little research and found that you are correct - not being in the “field”, I always looked at the two as being connected at the hip, with a Psychopath being a Sociopath on steroids - I learned something new in my advancing years - thanks.
I’m in the over-the-hill category myself.
And I always reserve the right to be wrong. If I learned from all my mistakes I would be a genius. I still make mistakes and keep on learning from them.
Luckily, or not, I’m married so I have someone to keep pointing out the mistakes I make. 🤣
I’m in the same state - over the hill and married to a woman who isn’t afraid to point out the “occasional” foible.
But one of the best things my Dad taught me was the ability to laugh at myself - that way I get to laugh several times a day no matter all the bad news happening.🥸
Some day all the humans that remain may end up in human zoos.
The AIs will walk by and point at the weird creatures.
The humans will be yelling at the AIs—”We are conscious and you are not.”
The AIs will be yelling back—”look who is in the zoo”.
Since I have learned to laugh at myself I have never run out of humor.
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