Eric Schwitzgebel

Eric Schwitzgebel is the rare thinker who has spent a career dismantling confidence about minds—including our own—and arrived at artificial intelligence having already concluded that consciousness is far less transparent than common sense allows. A professor of philosophy at UC Riverside trained under John Searle and Alison Gopnik, he built his reputation on two interlocking claims: that naive introspection is unreliable even in favorable circumstances, and that every serious theory of mind is, on examination, bizarre. From this hard-won humility he derives his central warning about AI—what he calls debatable personhood: we may soon build systems that some reasonable people regard as conscious persons and others reasonably regard as empty machinery, and that uncertainty throws civilization into a full rights dilemma with no painless resolution. He does not offer reassurance; he offers a dilemma, and the honesty of that offering is what makes him essential reading for anyone who takes [YOU] on