AI Consciousness Is the Question That Refuses to Stay Philosophical

Shevlin's argument does not claim AI systems are conscious — it claims the distinction may not matter socially. People extend moral status on the basis of behavioral cues, and current AI systems produce behavioral cues at scale ^[9]. This is what makes the position so difficult to argue against: the critics who point to the absence of "emergent properties of consciousness in any of the models at this point" are answering the empirical question while Shevlin is asking the sociological one.