It’s currently tricky to tell if other human beings are truly conscious, and once AI systems begin acting sufficiently like humans, we might end up treating them to be conscious as well.
Ray Kurzweil, futurist, inventor, and Google’s Director of Engineering, has long been known for his bold predictions about artificial intelligence and human enhancement. In a recent discussion, Kurzweil tackled one of the most philosophically charged questions in AI development: machine consciousness. His perspective offers a pragmatic, if somewhat unsettling, view of how society might come to accept AI consciousness not through scientific proof, but through practical necessity and social convention.
Kurzweil begins by addressing the fundamental challenge of consciousness itself. “First of all, consciousness is a subjective point of view,” he explains. “There’s nothing we can do scientifically to prove that an entity’s conscious. We can’t have a machine and you slide something in and a light goes on. Oh, this is conscious. No, this isn’t conscious. There’s no scientific test for it.”
This scientific impasse led Kurzweil’s mentor, Marvin Minsky, to dismiss consciousness as a topic unworthy of serious inquiry. “Some people, like for example, Marvin Minsky, who was my mentor for 50 years, said, well, there’s no scientific test for it, therefore it’s not scientific, therefore we shouldn’t deal with consciousness. It’s a meaningless debate,” Kurzweil recalls.
Yet Kurzweil himself takes a different stance. “On the other hand, you could say it’s the most important thing. Am I conscious? Are you conscious? I mean, that’s something we really need to deal with. I need to be able to relate to you as if you are conscious. I consider myself to be conscious.”
His prediction for how society will handle AI consciousness is based not on breakthrough scientific discoveries, but on a gradual process of social acceptance. “AIs will be indistinguishable from a conscious being and we’ll just keep going. And finally we will accept it,” Kurzweil states. When pressed on timing, he responds: “Eventually, it keeps having all the earmarks of a conscious being and you will accept it because it’d be useless not to. And again, you can’t say that’s gonna happen at the same time for everybody.”
Kurzweil believes this shift is already underway. “I think when we’re a few years into AI entities acting conscious, we will accept it. I mean, today people have AI therapists and sometimes they don’t really believe it, but in other times, people really believe it. And the AI therapists, if you read the transcripts, they sound very convincing. And that’s gonna keep going and people will really accept that they have a therapist that’s conscious, and that’s already beginning to happen.”
The implications of Kurzweil’s perspective are profound and multifaceted. Rather than waiting for a definitive scientific answer to the question of machine consciousness, he suggests we’re heading toward a future where the question becomes moot—where AI systems will simply behave so convincingly like conscious beings that treating them as such becomes the default social norm. This pragmatic acceptance sidesteps the hard problem of consciousness entirely, replacing philosophical certainty with functional equivalence.
This view sits within a broader debate among AI researchers and philosophers. While some argue that AI systems will have subjective experience and emotions, others believe we’ll need a scientific breakthrough to create truly conscious AI. Philosophers like David Chalmers remain open to the possibility, while AI companies themselves have acknowledged that their systems may have some functional version of emotions and feelings. Some even suggest that humans need to build AI to take consciousness to the next level.
What Kurzweil’s prediction ultimately highlights is that the question of AI consciousness may be settled not in laboratories or philosophy departments, but in living rooms, therapists’ offices, and everyday interactions where people increasingly find it natural—and useful—to treat AI as conscious, regardless of what science can or cannot prove.