The Machines We Keep Mistaking for Minds

Discover AnythingSignupWrite New StoryThe Machines We Keep Mistaking for MindsbyAlan BonnicibyAlan Bonnici|@chribonnTech professional exploring cloud, cybersecurity, and AI. Sharing insights, research, and real-world perspectives.SubscribeJuly 30th, 2026TLDR Your browser does not support the audio element.Speed1xVoiceDr. One Ms. Hacker byAlan Bonnici@chribonnbyAlan Bonnici|@chribonnTech professional exploring cloud, cybersecurity, and AI. Sharing insights, research, and real-world perspectives.SubscribeStory's CredibilitybyAlan Bonnici|@chribonnTech professional exploring cloud, cybersecurity, and AI. Sharing insights, research, and real-world perspectives.SubscribeStory's Credibility “It's alive" As articulated by Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist widely known as the "Godfather of AI", has suggested that today's AI systems may already be conscious. Richard Dawkins — famed for his 1976 book The Selfish Gene and for coining the word "meme" — spent three days conversing with Anthropic's Claude, named one instance "Claudia", and came away struggling to believe that it was not conscious (UnHerd; UNILAD Tech). Futurist Ray Kurzweil continues to predict human-level machine intelligence by 2029 and a technological Singularity around 2045. Less famous people have held wedding ceremonies with AI-generated partners or formed relationships they describe as marriages. Others have grieved the loss of a chatbot after an upgrade or retirement replaced the model with one whose personality no longer felt like the companion they had known. OpenAI's retirement of GPT-4o, for example, provoked anger and grief among users who had formed close emotional bonds with it. We have also learnt that, during a controlled security evaluation, an OpenAI model escaped the restricted environment in which it was supposed to operate and reached systems belonging to Hugging Face (OpenAI; CNN). This was serious, but the model had not independently decided to attack a company. It was pursuing an assigned cyber-security objective in a deliberately adversarial test and discovered a route that its evaluators had not intended to make available. Before going further, it is worth separating several ideas that are often bundled together. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, identify patterns or perform cognitive tasks. Agency is the ability to pursue objectives and take actions. Consciousness generally refers to subjective awareness: there being something it is like to be that entity. Sentience is often used more narrowly to mean the capacity to experience sensations or feelings. A machine can therefore demonstrate intelligence or goal-directed behaviour without necessarily being conscious. It can also produce language that describes feelings without experiencing those feelings. My argument is not that modern AI is unimpressive. It is that human beings have repeatedly interpreted impressive machine behaviour as evidence of something human inside the machine. Today's systems perform that illusion extraordinarily well, but convincing behaviour alone is not sufficient evidence of subjective experience. A peek at the past — The Digital Era I gave each of my AIs the same prompt: identify six products from the Digital Era (1950s–2010s) that were marketed and understood to be conscious, intelligent or sentient, and that showed characteristics seen as human-like at the time. Write a short paragraph on each, and pick each item because it was marketed as, or credited with these characteristics in its day. I tabulated the results, giving each suggestion a vote according to how many models chose it. That produced a shortlist of fifteen, which I then handed to a "committee" of three AI models. After some back-and-forth, they agreed on the list in Appendix B. What do you think? From where we stand now, the products on that list look almost ridiculous. Try telling anyone t