Out of My Other Mind – What are the defining characteristics of a conscious AI?

Jim Waldo traces how the question of telling whether an AI is conscious runs through Turing's behavioral test, Searle's Chinese room, and the older philosophical "problem of other minds" from Descartes through Mill's argument by analogy. He notes that a 2023 paper, "Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness," found no AI system meeting its proposed criteria while seeing no obvious technical barriers to building one, and that AI's limited interaction with the world weakens the analogy to humans and animals. The question, he argues, is not technical and has resisted a clear solution for centuries, yet the need for one grows with each new frontier model.