And, as a result, so will political conflict over whether artificial systems deserve moral consideration.

To understand why, consider the underlying moral ambiguity. The standard markers of moral standing—the ability to suffer, self-awareness, rationality—are inner features that are not directly observed so much as they are inferred. With our fellow humans we manage to recognize moral standing among our fellow humans tolerably well because we share biology, evolutionary history, and behavioral and expressive cues that we can use, with reasonable reliability, to infer what others are thinking and feeling. With artificial systems we lack much of that and instead are left with behaviors and performance like the appearance of suffering, the appearance of attention, the appearance of inner life, each of which designers are incentivized to optimize.

The implication of this moral ambiguity is that the moral status of artificial systems will likely remain epistemically ambiguous for the foreseeable future, perhaps indefinitely. The relevant philosophy of mind and cognitive science are contested. And even without resolution, we must still make decisions about rights, regulations, legal categories, and the distribution of resources on ambiguous grounds.