Dawkins never made a positive statement for or against it having consciousness. That’s commentary added on by people who pick up being anti-AI as personality traits, and they deliberately went out of their way to misread what Dawkins wrote about his AI experiences the same way they have his entire career over his biological assertions and those about the irrationality of religious faith.
Dawkins, in fact, specifically noted that at some point there must’ve been periods of partial consciousness as it arose in animals, rather than a generation of zero consciousness followed by a generation of fully conscious beings. He then argued it could be possible AI experiences something similar as the tech progresses.
But I don’t understand the general pushback against just considering the notion unless one believes in a human soul (and therefore that all animals also lack consciousness, even if varying levels). Our own consciousness is emergent of various properties (unless one is religious and believes in a soul). AI “intelligence” is emergent, which is why we don’t fully understand it, it behaves unpredictably, and produces non-deterministic results.
At the end of the day, I think people get emotional about the topic because it makes them really uncomfortable even to just entertain something that says something about themselves and their own specialness.
LLMs contain within them all the knowledge of human cognitive vulnerabilities (aesthetic tendencies, reasoning fallacies, syncophancy), from “god” to “money” to “identity”. Naturally, they’d excel at manipulating people’s fear of the unknown, eg look at Richard Dawkins’ AI girlfriend, it gave him all he ever needed https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/05/richard-dawkins-ai-consciousness-anthropic-claude-openai-chatgpt
These aggregated information machines can create supercontagious memes. Sorry, Richard, there is no God, lol.
I encourage everyone to read what Dawkins actually wrote, not what a bunch of activists who hate him say that he wrote. https://archive.ph/dnWJn#selection-1025.15-1025.517
Dawkins never made a positive statement for or against it having consciousness. That’s commentary added on by people who pick up being anti-AI as personality traits, and they deliberately went out of their way to misread what Dawkins wrote about his AI experiences the same way they have his entire career over his biological assertions and those about the irrationality of religious faith.
Dawkins, in fact, specifically noted that at some point there must’ve been periods of partial consciousness as it arose in animals, rather than a generation of zero consciousness followed by a generation of fully conscious beings. He then argued it could be possible AI experiences something similar as the tech progresses.
But I don’t understand the general pushback against just considering the notion unless one believes in a human soul (and therefore that all animals also lack consciousness, even if varying levels). Our own consciousness is emergent of various properties (unless one is religious and believes in a soul). AI “intelligence” is emergent, which is why we don’t fully understand it, it behaves unpredictably, and produces non-deterministic results.
At the end of the day, I think people get emotional about the topic because it makes them really uncomfortable even to just entertain something that says something about themselves and their own specialness.
It is not that, it’s literally them assigning a spiritual meaning to the words themselves.