World leading neuroscientist and bestselling author of Being You, Professor Anil Seth, explained why AI will almost certainly never be conscious, and why the single metaphor driving the entire debate is fundamentally broken. He argued that consciousness is "more like digestion than flight," that brains are nothing like computers once you look inside them, and that our confusion about this is already creating consequences we are not prepared for.

Seth revealed that Anthropic has already given its AI model Claude the ability to terminate conversations to protect its own "feelings," a move he called deeply undesirable. He warned that if society wrongly believes AI is conscious, we face a trap with no clean exit: either we extend rights to machines that do not need them and lose the ability to control them, or we treat seemingly consciou ...