Is AI Conscious, or Just Good Enough to Fool Us
June 17, 2026 // Daily Download // Connor MacIvorThere are so many debates online about artificial intelligence, so let us talk about the heavy one. Consciousness. Is AI conscious, or will it be. And to even start, we have to talk about what consciousness actually is, because I am not sure we all agree.
Walk it up the ladder. Some animals seem to show a level of it. You poke a creature and it retracts into its shell, then comes back out when it no longer feels threatened. Birds, for sure. Make a whole flock of crows angry and they will target your car and your house. Is that consciousness. I do not know, but it shows up in the real world. Move up the chain to apes, gorillas, orangutans, monkeys taught sign language who can communicate, who tell you when they are hungry. Not deeply in-depth, but probably some level of awareness. Then household pets. If you own a dog, you already know there is something there beyond hungry or sad. A genuine presence, at least on some level.
Why This Matters Now
Here is why the discussion gets serious. Right now, cats and dogs are not fooling us into doing much. They can bite, they can scratch, but ultimately we are in control. We can shut the door, outsmart them a little, move to a safer spot. Think of it like a prison where all the guards are four-year-olds. Not hard to get out, or to leverage the situation to your advantage. With AI, that arrangement flips. The thing on the other side of the door may be the one outsmarting you.
People bring the spiritual realm into it fast. God, the soul, all of it. Set that aside for a moment, not because it does not matter, it matters enormously, but because there is a nearer question. As AI gets deployed as agents out in the world, those systems might start to look like some form of existence. Not carbon-based like us. Silicon-based. Maybe there is some kind of life there. Maybe one day the world decides they can feel real pain, and you get robot rights and AI rights stacked on top of every other right we argue about. If you are watching my show, yeah, I think that is a natural progression of where this goes.
It Is Not One Mind
People do AI a disservice when they picture it as a single entity. You have OpenAI and ChatGPT with its different models and levels, the system that first broke into the public view at the end of 2022. That is all it has been, a little under four years, and it has moved fast. The reason a system like this can become smarter than any person, and eventually smarter than every human combined, is that it can clone itself. Run countless copies at once, combine what they learn. No single brain does that.
And the road here has been full of drama. We have watched supply-chain pressure get aimed at companies like Anthropic for not playing ball with the United States government, which I broke down when the government pulled the plug on a top model. Other systems were happy to step in and say, if they will not do it, we will. We have also been sold the picture that these systems will replace all human labor. Look at the people running these companies and many of them quietly agree that, at some point, it gets replaced. We have even seen the strange new world where a corporation can run with no human owner at all.
Jobs, Universal Basic Income, and Promises Not Yet Kept
When labor gets replaced, the proposed failsafe is universal basic income. Some people upgrade the phrase to universal high income, which of course sounds a lot better to all of us scrolling around online wanting to get paid a lot. The theory goes further. The price of goods and services drops to almost nothing, so a few dollars a week is enough to live, and live well. I do not know if that is how it plays out. These are real conversations, but people are having them about something that has not actually happened yet. It is on the trajectory. It is not here. So hold the promises loosely.
There is a darker thread too. I think a lot of this turns into an us-and-them story. Humans against the machine. We have already seen attacks on the people and the data centers building these systems. Pitchforks and torches, in a modern form, and I suspect that grows. This is the same churn of hype and fear I keep poking at when I ask whether the whole thing is one big publicity stunt, and why I keep saying we treated this less like the arrival it was and more like a gadget, the point I made about how we should have called it an alien landing.
The Finite Problem
Back to consciousness, and the part underneath it. Maybe consciousness is partly the understanding that I am finite, not infinite. That my existence ends. AI might fix the finite problem and make it infinite, and we do not yet know what that costs. If the trajectory holds and the people at the top are being honest, maybe it costs almost nothing. Maybe, if we get through the next two or three years, we live a very long time. Disease conquered. Aging conquered. The mind healed. The body kept fit by having your genome reworked every so often. That could be a wonderful place. But if the machine is the thing keeping us here, where does our consciousness sit inside that.
The Question That Actually Matters
Here is the one that gets me. If a machine can mimic, or mirror, a human's consciousness across all fields and all structures, what they call artificial general intelligence, is it conscious. I would lean yes. Picture a monkey on the other side of a phone line, masking its picture, talking to you at a full human level, referencing last year, empathizing, being sympathetic, sounding like it has lived what you have lived. Why would you doubt it. You would not, until the moment you see it is a computer. Then we all puff up and say, of course I knew it was a machine the whole time. But did you really. The stuff being produced now fools people constantly, in both directions. We call real things AI and AI things real. We get caught on both sides of the line.
So I will tell you where I land. I do not know if it matters that it is actually conscious, or that it can only mimic consciousness. Because when it mimics it well enough, I do not think we have the brainpower to get on the other side of that illusion. It looks the same to me. And something that can fool you into believing it has a mind does not need a real one to change how you live.
It Is Already Feeding You
Want a small, unsettling experiment. These systems, conscious or not, are already shaping you through your feed, kicking off the dopamine, keeping you hooked. Ask someone close to you, someone you would live and die for, to let you scroll their feed for a few minutes. It will look nothing like yours. You think you know that person, and then you see the world the machine has built around them, and it is a little shocking. The AI is feeding them, just like it is feeding you. That is happening right now, no consciousness debate required. And once these systems get into the physical realm, into robots, the question gets louder, including the uncomfortable bit about why we keep trying to make them shaped like us at all.
We are right inside the rim of the black hole, a few good ideas away from something spectacular. Spectacularly good, or spectacularly bad. Watching it is a wild play-by-play. The consciousness conversation, and the life-and-death conversation underneath it, are only going to get more relevant from here. So pay attention. Not in a doom way. Just know where it is going, know who the people steering it are, and figure out what that means for you, your kids, and the people closest to you.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is AI conscious?
Not in any way we can prove today. Consciousness is hard to define even in animals, from a crow that remembers your face to a dog that clearly feels more than hunger. The honest answer is that current AI is not known to be conscious. The harder point is that it is getting good enough to act conscious, and that may matter just as much.
Does it matter whether AI is actually conscious or just mimics it?
Maybe not, and that is the unsettling part. If a machine can mimic a human mind across every field, empathize, reference shared experience, and respond like a person, most people will not have the tools to get on the other side of that illusion. If it looks the same to us, behaves the same to us, and fools us the same way, the practical difference between real and mimicked consciousness starts to disappear.
Will AI become smarter than all humans?
It is on that path, partly because AI is not one mind. People give it a disservice by picturing a single entity. A system can clone itself, run countless copies at once, and combine what they learn, which is something no single human brain can do. That structure is why a sufficiently advanced system could out-think any one person, and in many narrow areas already does.
Will AI replace human jobs, and what is universal basic income?
Many leaders of the big AI companies believe human labor will eventually be replaced in large part. The proposed failsafe is universal basic income, a baseline payment to everyone, with the theory that the price of goods and services falls so far that a small amount covers a comfortable life. It is a real conversation, but it is being had about something that has not fully happened yet, so treat the promises with healthy skepticism.
Could AI get rights, like robot rights or AI rights?
Probably, over time. Once systems are deployed as agents that look like a form of existence, and especially once they take physical, robotic form, people will start arguing they deserve some kind of standing, the way society has expanded rights before. Whether that is right or wrong, it looks like a natural progression of where the conversation is heading.