If software can be "conscious" then we need a new word to describe what it is that a person has that makes me care about them in a way I never would care about the output of a program.

Fighting about semantics is not as interesting as the question of whether we should care about and give rights to a program running in memory like we do the owner of a human brain.

I will make a prediction here that Dawkins will believe AI is conscious since it pushes forward his arguments for atheism by inductive reasoning. There’s no difference between soulless humans and conscious machines.

The trap is, though, that we invented AI, so if AI is conscious, we are their gods? I wonder what Dawkins thinks about that.