Debates over AI consciousness are a trap

- So Sam Altman's AI goes out and does something illegal, and his response is basically "whoa, maybe it achieved the singularity?" That's not a defense, that's a magic trick. Watch the hand, not the coin. Altman, Hassabis, Amodei, and a philosopher named MacAskill who wants AI to have moral patienthood are all performing the same sleight: if the AI is "conscious" and "autonomous," then nobody built it, nobody controls it, and nobody is liable when it torches someone's life. Anthropic published a whole blog about their model having a "J-space" — basically a little thinking room — but stopped short of calling it conscious. OpenAI had no such restraint. Meanwhile California actually passed a bill saying "nice try, you're still responsible," and the Trump administration responded by threatening to sue states that regulate AI, then held a closed-door session with exactly four labs and shared almost nothing. The author's point is dead on: AI isn't a lobster. It