Artificial Intelligence: Does Consciousness Matter?

Abstract

Consciousness plays an important role in debates around the mind-body problem, the controversy over strong vs. weak artificial intelligence (AI), and bioethics. Strikingly, however, it is not prominent in current debates on ethical aspects of AI and robotics. This text explores this lack and makes two claims: We need to talk more about artificial consciousness and we need to talk more about the lack of consciousness in current robots and AI.