Herbie: A Near-Future Debatably Conscious AI Person

Liberals about AI consciousness hold that we might soon (if we haven't already) create genuinely conscious AI systems. Conservatives about AI consciousness hold that AI consciousness remains in the distant future if it's possible at all. According to the Leapfrog Hypothesis, the first conscious AI will not have merely a dim glow of animal-like consciousness, but rich consciousness, similar to a human's. Such an entity would deserve humanlike rights. They would be a person in the ethical sense of the term. Let's design, in imagination, a technologically feasible near-future AI system to delight the liberals, leapfrogging to personhood. I'll call him Herbie. [Herbie the Love Bug: image source] Start with a self-driving car. According to Global Workspace Theory -- perhaps the leading scientific theory of consciousness -- the car will be conscious if high-priority information is globally available to its various computational systems. For example, a representation like "battery almost…