We may be unable to tell if AGI becomes real, and big tech may exploit it

A valid test for determining whether artificial intelligence (AI) has become conscious won’t be available in the foreseeable future, raising the risk that technological companies will exploit the knowledge gap to sell their “clever” AI products.

Dr. Tom McClelland, a philosopher at the University of Cambridge, argues that existing evidence for what constitutes consciousness isn’t sufficient to tell if or when AI has become conscious.

In the university’s blog, McClelland writes that consciousness alone is not enough to make AI matter ethically. What matters more is sentience, a particular type of consciousness that includes positive and negative feelings.

“Sentience involves conscious experiences that are good or bad, which is what makes an entity capable of suffering or enjoyment. This is when ethics kicks in,” he writes.

McClelland emphasizes that even if AI is made to become conscious, this kind of consciousness will unlikely be a cause for concern.

For example, while having self-driving cars that experience the road in front of them is a huge leap, their consciousness would only matter if they started to have an emotional response to their destinations.

Is general artificial intelligence coming soon?

Major technological companies around the world are racing to become the first one to build what is called general artificial intelligence (AGI), or machines with cognitive abilities that match those of humans.

Tech leaders have repeatedly said that AGI is just around the corner. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote in a blog post at the beginning of 2025 that “we are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.”

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei stated in January that he was “more confident than ever” for AI to reach “powerful capabilities” in the next two to three years.

A more conservative deadline was given by Demis Hassabi, CEO of Google’s DeepMind, who said AGI is “probably three to five years away.”

Such predictions may be influenced by genuine optimism but also tech companies’ efforts to prop up their stock valuations.

MIT Technology Review has recently called AGI the “most consequential conspiracy theory of our time,” reflecting the doubts of AI researchers about when superintelligence will be developed, or whether it will occur at all.

A recent paper argues that there will never be enough computing power to replicate the human ability to observe, learn, and gain new insights. Therefore, developing AGI is impossible.

“Any factual AI systems created in the short run are at best decoys. When we think these systems capture something deep about ourselves and our thinking, we induce distorted and impoverished images of ourselves and our cognition,” the study authors wrote.

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A 2025 survey of 475 members of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence reveals that the majority (76%) of respondents believe that “scaling up current AI approaches” to yield AGI is “unlikely” or “very unlikely” to succeed.

McClelland argues there is a risk that the inability to prove AI consciousness will be exploited by the tech industry to make outlandish claims about their products.

He writes, “It becomes part of the hype, so companies can sell the idea of a next level of AI cleverness.”

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