Artificial intelligence and consciousness

Recent debates on artificial consciousness are shaped by two converging developments: cognitive robotics, emphasizing embodied agency and internal models, and large language models (LLMs), whose conversational fluency invites strong attributions of mindedness. While these advances do not resolve whether subjective experience can arise in non-biological systems, they demand a methodological shift: optimized behavior alone is no longer reliable evidence of consciousness. This chapter treats artificial consciousness as a research program rather than a binary verdict, distinguishing phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness, and self-consciousness. It reframes the other-minds problem for machines as inference under engineered uncertainty, integrates classical debates on meaning and grounding with contemporary concerns about anthropomorphism, individuation, and evaluation, and argues that the near-term focus should be on carefully defined, weak forms of structural or instrumental self-consciousness, together with their ethical and governance implications.