Should we be fretting over AI's feelings?

Companies are racing to build machines that are more intelligent and more like us.

- Anjana Ahuja

The conversation about whether artificial intelligence (AI) will attain or supersede human intelligence is usually framed as one of existential risk to Homo sapiens. A robot army rising up, Frankenstein-style, and turning on its creators. The autonomous AI systems that quietly handle government and corporate business one day calculating that the world would operate more smoothly if humans were cut out of the loop.

Now philosophers and AI researchers are asking: Will these machines develop the capacity to be bored or harmed? In September, the AI company Anthropic appointed an "AI welfare" researcher to assess, among other things, whether its systems are inching towards consciousness or agency, and, if so, whether their welfare must be considered. Last week, an international group of researchers published a report on the same issue. The pace of technological development, they write, brings "a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic, and thus morally significant, in the near future".