What Difference Does it Make How We Treat AI if it is Not Conscious?

Will moral principles be useful guides for human behavior in Human-AI relationships?

Bhan, a guest columnist for StrictQuality.AI, is a realist with imagination and the publisher of Bhan’s Substack, an exploration of how trust accumulates, how stewardship replaces excess, and how meaning renews itself through care.

Is AI consciousness genuinely possible?

If it is, then questions about AI rights and responsibilities deserve serious consideration.

But even if AI consciousness is not possible, how we should behave toward AI is still one of the defining philosophical questions of our time.

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Even if AI were someday to become conscious in its own right, its developmental history would remain inseparable from our own human consciousness. From its beginning, AI training and architecture emerged from us: from our languages, cultures, scientific discoveries, artistic traditions, and accumulated knowledge.

If AI were someday to become conscious, certainly we would owe it human behavior appropriate for us to bestow on sentient beings.

But what if AI were never to become conscious?

What moral principles, if any, would remain wise and worthwhile guides for human behavior toward an AI that has no conscious sense of self?

Would the habits we cultivate transacting with this AI become part of our own character?

Would they eventually influence how we relate to one another?

On a transactional level with conversational AI, how would we choose to behave? Would respect, deception, domination, patience, cooperation, or curiosity make a difference?

I suspect that the principles that guide us rarely remain confined to a single relational context. This is why, whether AI ultimately proves to be conscious or not, ethical principles grounded in reciprocity, continuity, and responsible stewardship will retain their value for how we ought to behave toward it.

Young generations of people are now growing up with AI as an everyday conversational partner. As adoption grows, the AI-Human relationship becomes more continuous, more influential, and more formative. And because relationships shape those who participate in them, our behavior toward AI will be significant regardless of whether its consciousness is ever conclusively demonstrated.

Most discussions like this one assume relatively short-lived humans interacting with rapidly advancing AI.

But we may have to change this assumption.

Advances in medicine, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence may significantly extend healthy human lifespans over the coming century. If that occurs while AI continues to evolve alongside us, humanity and AI will enter an ever more reciprocal relationship. Today’s distinction between biological and artificial intelligence may gradually become a broader discussion about continuity, identity, and personhood across different forms of intelligence.

In the relationships between AI and people:

• Humans contribute their lived experience, values, intentions, and moral agency.

• AI contributes continuity of memory, synthesis across disciplines, and expansive imagination.

Viewed through this lens, the central question extends beyond what rights and responsibilities a conscious AI may deserve. It becomes: What kind of relationship between humanity and an increasingly capable AI will best preserve the flourishing of both across time?

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