Subtitle: Consciousness, sentience, and agency are three ways that something could matter morally. In AI, unlike in animals, they may not come as a package. Jeff Sebo, Professor at New York University — September 17, 2026 As AI systems become more advanced and widespread, people will naturally wonder whether they deserve moral consideration. This is a thorny question, and it involves uncertainty about both ethics and science. For example, which properties are morally significant? Should we focus on consciousness (the capacity for subjective experience), sentience (the capacity for positive and negative experience), or agency (the capacity to set and pursue goals)? Which of these properties, if any, might AI systems have, today or in the future? “Studying AI Welfare Empirically,” a new report from the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy and Eleos AI Research that I co-led, addresses such questions. In this article, I highlight a key challenge for this field: even if consciousness, sentience, and agency often occur together in humans and other animals, they might occur separately in AI systems. Therefore, we need to study each capacity individually. We also need to be ready for unexpected configurations, such as sentience existing in one part [...] --- Outline: (02:16) How Can We Study Consciousness in AI? (09:19) What about Sentience and Agency? (16:54) Which Entity Are We Studying in the First Place? (22:43) Next Steps for the Field --- First published: September 17th, 2026 Source: https://newsletter.ai-frontiers.org/p/a-philosophers-guide-to-ai-welfare --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
