Project Language
English only.
Minimum Time Commitment
10 hours per week.
Project Abstract
AI systems increasingly exhibit human-like behaviors: conversational fluency, apparent preferences, emotional expression. This raises practical questions for developers, policymakers, and researchers. How should we evaluate claims about AI sentience? What design choices affect moral status? How should organizations handle uncertainty about machine minds?
No accessible educational resource covers these questions systematically. Academic philosophy of mind doesn't address AI specifically; AI ethics courses skip consciousness foundations; existing primers are either too technical or too invested in a particular answer.
This project develops a self-guided primer covering the conceptual foundations needed to reason about AI consciousness, sentience, and moral status.
Curriculum structure (8 weeks, 3–4 hours/week):
Foundations: What are consciousness and sentience, and why do they matter for AI development?
Theories of consciousness: Functionalism, Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, biological naturalism; testability and empirical constraints.
Application to AI systems: Current architectures vs. theoretical requirements; proposed tests; limitations of external assessment.
Alternative frameworks: Relational approaches (moral status as emergent from relationships rather than intrinsic properties); virtue-based approaches; lessons from animal cognition research.
Decision-making under uncertainty: Moral risk frameworks, precautionary approaches, design implications.
Current landscape: Who's working on this, where the field is heading, open problems.
SAIGE scholar role: Develop 2–3 modules, with particular attention to perspectives underrepresented in existing English-language resources. European continental philosophy, German-language sources, and critical perspectives are obvious gaps. Pilot testing with a German-speaking group strengthens SAIGE's national infrastructure while contributing to the global field.
Outputs: Complete module drafts, facilitator guide for group study, annotated bibliography, pilot test results.
Mentee profile: Background in philosophy, cognitive science, or AI ethics. Comfortable synthesizing across intellectual traditions; strong writing for accessible but rigorous content. German language skills are valuable for identifying sources that haven't made it into the English-language conversation.
Theory of Change
Bad frameworks produce bad decisions. The question of machine moral status will increasingly affect AI development and governance. Currently, most people reasoning about it lack adequate conceptual tools. This matters for catastrophic risk in several ways.
Under-reaction: if AI systems develop welfare-relevant internal states and we lack frameworks to recognize this, we may create systems with misaligned interests while dismissing their signals as "mere computation." A system that experiences something like suffering under certain conditions, and whose operators dismiss this, is a system with reason to deceive.
Over-reaction: anthropomorphizing systems that lack morally relevant properties wastes attention and resources, and may constrain beneficial AI development without corresponding benefit.
Poor discourse: without shared conceptual foundations, public debate about AI consciousness polarizes between dismissive and credulous positions. Neither serves good governance.
The primer addresses these by training researchers and practitioners to reason carefully across multiple frameworks, recognize what each assumes, and navigate uncertainty without false confidence. The German focus (incorporating European philosophical traditions, piloting with German-speaking users) builds SAIGE's national infrastructure while contributing to the broader field.
Conceptual clarity is infrastructure. This project builds it.
Desired Mentee Background
Philosophy, Cognitive science, or AI ethics.
Desired Mentee Level of Education
Any level.
Other Mentee Requirements
Comfortable synthesizing across intellectual traditions; strong writing for accessible but rigorous content. German language skills are valuable for identifying sources that haven't made it into the English-language conversation.