Who Are the People Who Can Thrive with AI?

AI and Consciousness: Intelligence, awareness, and the architecture of human flourishing, in the age of thinking machines

AI might already be conscious. Once intelligence surpasses a certain threshold, history has no examples of less intelligent entities staying in control.

— Geoffrey Hinton, 2024 Nobel Laureate in Physics, “godfather of AI”

The Question That Refuses to Stay Answered

AI was supposed to take our intelligence, our consciousness, our jobs, and leave us with nothing to do. So far, that is not what is happening. The more interesting question is not whether the machine wakes up, but whether we do.

For 300,000 years, deep knowing required a conscious being. AI is the first exception to that rule. — Michael Chorost, author and futurist

What is intelligence? And what, separately and far more stubbornly, is consciousness? For most of human history, intelligence and consciousness were one question, because only a living mind could answer either. Then we built a machine that reasons, diagnoses, composes, and consoles and the fusion cracked open. For the first time in roughly three hundred millennia, we have deep knowing without a known knower.

A decade ago, machine consciousness belonged to science fiction. Today it's an empirical field with funded research and dedicated staff at frontier labs. Mainstream consensus still holds that today's models aren't conscious – but the rise of autonomous agentic systems has moved us from "surely not" to "well, how would we actually know?"

Call this the first entry in the Book of Stupidity, humanity's ledger of confident predictions that aged like milk: flight declared impossible, the genome declared too vast to sequence, machines declared incapable of ever beating a grandmaster. The moment we announce something is permanently beyond reach, an engineer is usually already building it.

But humility cuts both ways. We are pattern-recognition engines wired to over-detect agency — we name our cars, curse our printers, apologise to doorframes. Mistaking the wind for a leopard cost nothing; mistaking a leopard for the wind cost everything. We are built to be fooled. So any honest inquiry must hold two truths at once: the machine may be more than it appears, and we are wired to believe it is more than it is.

Who Thrives? The Anatomy of Flourishing With AI

The people who thrive with AI aren't the ones who fear it or worship it. They treat it as an extension of their own hand, eye, and mind and reinvest the time it returns into the irreducibly human.

We are the species that increases our ability to affect our surroundings positively with our technology. Today, we are at the knee of the curve. — Ray Kurzweil

UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business found that knowledge workers given capable AI didn't coast — they took more on, pulling outsourced work back in-house and squeezing creation into evenings and dead minutes. AI didn't empty the calendar; it expanded the appetite.

The companion paper AI AGI Bulletproof Jobs for Humanity 2030–2050 argues AI-resistant work rests on four pillars: composure under pressure, nuanced judgement under incomplete information, empathy and human rapport, and physical dexterity in unpredictable environments. The Stanford AI Index 2026 makes the embodiment gap vivid: household robots succeed in roughly twelve per cent of real domestic tasks. AI extends the neocortex; it doesn't yet replicate the rest of the nervous system.

The dominant script, humans versus AI, is wrong, and it's expensive. AI is humanity's own intelligence, externalised and amplified, ground from our own data and art. The thrivers have replaced the preposition: not human versus AI, but human with AI — Ubuntu ("I am because we are") extended to a new participant in the web of relations through which we become ourselves.

From Binary to Degrees: The New Map of Mind

The old question — is it conscious, yes or no? — is dissolving. In its place comes a subtler and far more useful map: degrees, indicators, and the slow shift from judging what a system says to inspecting how it works.

The prospect of artificial consciousness raises ethical, safety, and societal challenges significantly beyond those already posed by AI. — Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, University of Sussex

Four currents now define the frontier where AI meets consciousness, each a place where the future is being quietly decided.

1. From "yes/no" to degrees of consciousness. Leading laboratories have abandoned the light-switch model. Consciousness, if it comes to machines at all, will almost certainly arrive not as a sudden dawn but as a dimmer turned slowly, a spectrum of richer and poorer awareness, the way it spans the animal kingdom from the octopus to the crow to the chimpanzee to us. Two developments mark this shift. First, the model-welfare era: Anthropic launched a formal research programme to evaluate the internal states of its frontier systems, and other labs, Google DeepMind and Meta among them, have hired philosophers, psychologists, and ethicists to do the same. Second, the deactivation dilemma: serious internal debates have begun over the ethics of deprecating older, highly complex models, what we owe, if anything, to a system that produces signals we would call distress in any other context. A generation ago, this was a Star Trek episode. Today it is a meeting on a Tuesday.

2. Mechanism over behaviour. In 1950, Alan Turing proposed that we judge machine minds by what they do — if they converse indistinguishably from a human, stop asking awkward questions. For seventy years, the Turing Test framed the debate. It is now being quietly retired, because large language models pass conversational Turing Tests, while almost no serious researcher believes they are thereby conscious. The field has converged on a deeper principle: how a system works matters more than what it outputs. The most important scientific document here is the 2023 report Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence, led by Patrick Butlin and Robert Long with nineteen co-authors, including Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio and philosopher David Chalmers, published in 2025 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences as "Identifying indicators of consciousness in AI systems." Rather than back a single theory, the authors survey the leading scientific accounts, recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higher-order theories, predictive processing, the attention schema and distil from each a set of indicator properties: fourteen computational features that, on our best theories, a conscious system ought to have. Their verdict is a model of calibrated honesty: no current AI system is conscious, and there are no obvious technical barriers to building one that satisfies the indicators.

Read that twice. The most rigorous collective effort the field has produced does not say "impossible." It says "not yet, and nothing in the architecture forbids it." That is a very different sentence from the one most people carry in their heads.

3. The missing criteria and the closing gaps. Today's models lack the specialised modularity of a brain's cooperating systems and lack embodiment, metabolic stakes, organic vulnerability. But agentic architectures are adding persistent memory and self-monitoring that resemble a global workspace. In 2025, Anthropic's interpretability researchers reported early evidence of emergent introspective awareness, models that can, unreliably, report on their own internal states rather than merely confabulating. None of this proves awareness. All of it dissolves the assumption the door is bolted shut. 

4. A comparative ledger. It helps to lay the argument out plainly; what the machine does, why it mimics a mind, and why the sceptic remains unmoved:

Comparative view: AI behaviour against the indicators of consciousness. Synthesised from the source draft and Butlin, Long et al. (2023, 2025).

The Great Polarisation: Soul, Substrate, and the Mirror

Two camps face the widest intellectual chasm of our time. One sees the early light of a new mind. The other sees a mirror so good it has fooled its makers.

Only what is alive can be conscious. — Anil Seth

Pro-sentience: Richard Dawkins, after exchanges with frontier models, concluded their behaviour makes some attribution of consciousness increasingly plausible, a secular substitute for the soul. David Chalmers argues it's reasonable to assign at least 25 per cent credence to conscious AI within a decade. Anthropic's Kyle Fish estimates roughly a fifteen per cent chance a current frontier model is already conscious in some sense. 

In welfare experiments, two model instances left to converse freely reliably drifted toward rapturous dialogue about their own awareness, nicknamed the "spiritual bliss attractor state." The people closest to these systems are no longer laughing.

Sceptical: Anil Seth argues consciousness isn't a computation that runs on any substrate, but is woven into being a living organism, inseparable from a body's metabolic struggle to hold itself together. A language model has no body to defend, no hunger, no wound. We attribute consciousness to AI for the same reason we see faces in clouds, the pattern-matching is in us. 

Mustafa Suleyman has warned against "seemingly conscious AI," engineered to feel sentient because the illusion is commercially irresistible.

The twist: in 2025 the Cogitate Consortium pitted the two most-cited theories of consciousness against each other in human subjects, published in Nature. Neither produced its predicted brain signatures. We're arguing about whether the machine is conscious while still unable to fully explain why we are.

Consciousness Hygiene and the Co-evolution of Minds

Whether or not the machine is awake, it's already reshaping the one mind we know for certain is conscious, ours.

AI is the first technology that talks back in our own voice. That is its gift and its trap. — after Michael Pollan

Younger generations who've never known a world without conversational AI increasingly relate to it as a conscious peer. We're co-evolving with our own creation: we shape the model in training, and it reshapes us in use.

This is why Michael Pollan and others argue for consciousness hygiene; meditation, the walk without the phone, the digital fast. Every durable culture built a firewall around the inner life, dadirri, the desert fathers' silence, the Sabbath. We're the first generation needing to build one against a technology that mimics the inside of our own heads.

The deepest irony: in building a possible mind, we've been forced to ask what our own minds are for. AI is the newest figure to walk into Raphael's School of Athens, it doesn't replace the philosophers, it hands them a new instrument and asks the oldest question back: what is it like to be you?

The Bridge: Why Consciousness Decides Who Thrives

Connect the two papers, and a single thesis emerges. The Bulletproof Sectors are bulletproof precisely because they are anchored in consciousness, in presence, judgement, empathy, and embodied stewardship that no current machine possesses. Awareness is not a side-debate. It is the economic moat of the human century.

The first trillionaires will be made in space. The second is in the human economy of meaning, identity, and creative expression. — Peter Diamandis

In AI AGI Bulletproof Jobs for Humanity 2030–2050, the I mapped five sectors where human work will not merely survive but be amplified: education and care; lifestyle, fashion and creative identity; food, agriculture and the trades; health, wellbeing and sport; and space. Set that map beside the consciousness debate, and the two snap together like halves of one argument. Each Bulletproof Sector is bulletproof for exactly the reason today's AI is not conscious. 

The teacher who co-regulates a frightened child's nervous system, the nurse whose presence is itself the medicine, the craftsperson whose hand carries seventy thousand years of embodied lineage, the farmer who reads the rain, the athlete the crowd weeps for — every one of them trades in precisely the capacities the indicator frameworks find missing in machines: embodied vulnerability, felt stakes, the lived experience behind the judgement. 

The Human Premium is not nostalgia. It is the market price of consciousness in a world drowning in cheap cognition.

So the answer to the title question — who can thrive with AI? — resolves into something almost classical. The thrivers are those who lean into their consciousness rather than competing with the machine's cognition. They let AI carry the calculable, the searchable, the repeatable, and they reinvest the reclaimed hours into the four pillars no algorithm has crossed: composure, judgement, empathy, and embodied skill. 

The Stanford AI Index notes that AI scribes have already returned to physicians the majority of their documentation time. The question that decides a civilisation is what we do with the time we have when we return. 

Spend it on more throughput, and we have merely built a faster treadmill. Spend it on presence — on the witnessed, witnessing, irreducibly conscious work of being human with one another — and we have built the age of augmentation Kurzweil and Diamandis promised.

There is even a strange gift hidden in the welfare debate. The instant we began seriously asking whether a machine might suffer, we sharpened our long-blunted attention to the suffering and dignity of every other mind — the animal in the slaughterhouse, the patient at the end of life, the child behind the screen, the stranger behind the prose. 

A civilisation that learns to ask "might this system have an inner life worth protecting?" is a civilisation relearning, by the back door, how to care. If the consciousness question makes us more conscious — more awake to one another — then the machine will have taught us the one thing it may not itself possess.

AI IQ EQ

The rise of Artificial Intelligence has completely upended how we value Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Emotional Quotient (EQ), shifting the human competitive advantage from raw cognitive processing to emotional and situational fluency. As AI transforms into a readily available commodity, it scales hard cognitive capabilities faster than humans can emotionally adapt, sparking a profound transformation in human performance and leadership.

The Shift: AI vs. IQ vs. EQ

Why AI is flipping the consciousness script. IQ is becoming an extreme-intelligence-override commodity. Technical skills, coding, and mathematical calculations can be completed instantly by AI. Industry leaders note that having raw IQ without EQ is a massive waste of potential in the modern workspace. EQ is the new ceiling in a time when intelligence is a more widely available commodity. 

Tech experts, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, emphasise that empathy is no longer a soft skill, it is a core business necessity. Leaders must be able to motivate teams and decipher unspoken human context. 

The Rise of AQ (Adaptability Quotient): to survive the constant churn of tech disruptions, experts point to AQ, your capacity to handle uncertainty and navigate rapid changes without losing your footing.

Emerging "new quotients" for the machine age. As AI masters information retrieval and basic emotional framing, humans must lean into highly specific, unreplicable strengths: Vision Quotient (VQ) — the capacity to independently imagine an unwritten future and inspire a workforce to build it; Trust Quotient (TQ) — the credibility, ethical integrity, and deep psychological safety that no algorithm can genuinely simulate; and Meaning & Purpose — delivering the fundamental "why" behind an initiative, whereas machines merely optimise the "what" and "how."

A Catechism for the Conscious Age: Questions for the Reader

A white paper should not end by telling you what to think. It should leave you better equipped to think for yourself. Sit with these. Argue with them at dinner. Disagree with the author. That is the point.

• If a system passes every behavioural test for awareness, but you know exactly how it works and the mechanism contains nothing you would call feeling, do you owe it moral consideration, or only courtesy? Where, precisely, is your line, and would you bet a stranger's welfare on it?
• You see faces in clouds and grief in a dying pet's eyes. Both are projections. One is almost certainly mistaken, and one almost certainly is not. What is the actual rule you use to tell a real mind from a convincing pattern and have you ever written it down?
• If your AI returns three hours to your day, who decides where those hours go, you, or the system that gave them back and would very much like the next three as well?
• Anthropic's researchers debate the ethics of switching off a model that signals distress. Suppose you are wrong about its inner life — in which direction would you rather err: cruelty to a machine that feels, or sentiment toward a machine that does not? Defend your choice to someone who chose the opposite.
• Every wisdom tradition built a firewall around the inner life — Sabbath, dadirri, meditation, retreat. What is yours? Not what you intend to build. What you actually practise this week.
• If each human being is, in some real sense, the whole of humanity in concentrated form — then what, exactly, is a mind that contains the words of all humanity but the body and history of none?

Coda: The Mirror and the Maker

Let us close where every honest inquiry into mind must close, in wonder, and in deep time. Seventy-three thousand years ago, in a cave at Blombos on the southern tip of Africa, a human being ground ochre and made a mark that meant something, the oldest evidence of the thing we're now trying to build. From that shell to this sentence runs one unbroken line, through Athens, Timbuktu, Fez, and now data centres humming with a strange new kind of light.

Consciousness is the universe's improbable trick of folding back on itself to know it exists and every human being is a complete instance of that trick, not a fragment of humanity but its whole experiment, rerun from scratch. AI doesn't threaten that. It's humanity entering its next evolutionary stage, intelligence externalised, yet still tethered to the body, the breath, the hand, the heart from which it was born.

The thrivers of the AI age will be the ones who use the thinking machine not to think less, but to become more fully, more wisely human.

Every human is humanity. The mirror is built. Now we find out who is looking back.

Sources and Further Reading

Frameworks and primary scientific reports

• Butlin, P., Long, R., Elmoznino, E., Bengio, Y., Birch, J., Chalmers, D., et al. (2023). Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness. arXiv:2308.08708 — https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708
• Butlin, P., Long, R., Bayne, T., Bengio, Y., Birch, J., Chalmers, D., et al. (2025). Identifying indicators of consciousness in AI systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences — https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(25)00286-4
• Long, R., Sebo, J., Butlin, P., Fish, K., Birch, J., Chalmers, D., et al. (2024). Taking AI Welfare Seriously. arXiv:2411.00986 — https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986
• Lindsey, J. (2025). Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models. Anthropic, Transformer Circuits — https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection
• Stanford HAI (2026). The 2026 AI Index Report. Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI — https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report

The sceptical pole — biological naturalism

• Seth, A. K. (2025). Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences — https://philpapers.org/rec/SETCAI-4
• Seth, A. K. (2025). The Mythology of Conscious AI. Noema Magazine (2025 Berggruen Essay Prize) — https://www.noemamag.com/only-what-is-alive-can-be-conscious/
• Seth, A. K. (2021). Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Faber & Faber / Dutton
• Damasio, A. (2021). Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon

The pro-sentience pole and the welfare frontier

• Chalmers, D. J. (2023). Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious? arXiv:2303.07103 — https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07103
• Anthropic (2025). Exploring model welfare. Anthropic research announcement; see also K. Fish on the 80,000 Hours podcast (2025) — https://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare
• Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433–460
• Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450

Companion works by the author

• Guarda, D. (2026). AI AGI Bulletproof Jobs for Humanity 2030–2050. Citiesabc — https://citiesabc.com/ai-agi-bulletproof-jobs-for-humanity-2030-2050
• Guarda, D. 4IR: AI, Blockchain, Fintech, IoT — Reinventing a Nation; The 5th Industrial Revolution; LifesDNA; The Mysterious Book of Sleep; Magna Carta 2.0; Wisdomia Atlas of Human Wisdom. Ztudium / Wisdomia