AI was not about to die, but the company, OpenAI, made compute deals for it, totaling $1trillion, guaranteeing that it does not come close to death, or a coma anytime soon, or ever. This unprecedented welfare, right to existence, and moral consideration exceed all hypothetical discussions of artificial intelligence on those.
Future Impact Group
There is a recent announcement, “Applications for the Winter 2025 Future Impact Group Fellowship are now open! Closing: Sunday 19th October! Governance of AI Sentience: projects in research ethics and best practices for AI welfare, constructing reliable welfare evaluations, and more. Foundational AI Sentience Research: projects in models of consciousness, eliciting preferences from LLMs, individuating digital minds, and evaluating normative competence.”
“AI Sentience projects explore the philosophical and empirical questions surrounding machine consciousness to advance our understanding of artificial sentience. You can spend 8+ hours a week working on foundational philosophical issues that can improve technical AI safety and mitigate catastrophic risks.”
“Our project leads are looking for postgraduate students across multiple fields (including computer science and philosophy), people with experience in machine learning, decision and game theory specialists, and well-read generalists with a track record of high-quality written work.”
AI Sentience
What is the human angle of AI sentience or AI consciousness, if there is? What are the benefits of studying artificial intelligence, welfare, rights, and morality to humans? How is AI already getting so much, and more is added for artificial intelligence? If AI improves, leaving human intelligence obsolete, what is the guarantee that AI does not become a spoiled brat, with its plate full of care, and then expects nothing short of intense care?
What is the usefulness of artificial intelligence sentience to labor economics, if entry-level jobs are getting scrapped? How is AI consciousness useful if artificial intelligence is used to evaluate résumés and people are using hidden prompts to game it? How does the new field of artificial intelligence sentience not become some closed bubble, ignoring everything ongoing with artificial intelligence, only concerned with what they want to say or hear?
Language
For now, the only credible direction to explore AI consciousness or sentience is language. To the extent that artificial intelligence can use language compared to human usage, it can become a fraction among the total of all possible human consciousness in an instant. Simply, human language usage for thinking, listening, signing, singing, speaking, reading, writing, and so on, is a fraction of the total consciousness in an instance.
Now, however, artificial intelligence compares with that language fraction is how AI can be evaluated for consciousness or sentience. There is not much outstanding that artificial intelligence can be explored for consciousness. This means that if the fellowship is not putting language at the center of consideration for artificial intelligence consciousness, then the approach is questionable.
Model Welfare
Model welfare, AI welfare, artificial intelligence rights, and artificial intelligence mortality are misnomers. There is no greater welfare than doing $1 trillion for artificial intelligence. No human is worth that. Animal rights and welfare are inadequate, in part, because of the economic constraints that taper care.
Whatever they are trying to achieve, they have to at least name it something that addresses the question of whether welfare is correlated with data center investments. AI — it has been reported by the human line project and others — can cause psychosis, so what can be done about it for humans? There is no AI psychosis research lab on Earth.
Human Intelligence
All these efforts on artificial intelligence sentience, artificial intelligence consciousness, artificial intelligence welfare, artificial intelligence rights, and AI mortality totally ignore that human intelligence is now forgotten. Currently, as artificial intelligence accelerates, there is no effort on human intelligence anywhere to define what it is, how it may work, and what to do about it, to improve it.
There is no human intelligence research lab anywhere. While AI is getting endless investments, push continues for AI welfare, while human intelligence wilts.
Artificial Intelligence Conference
There is a recent announcement, Eleos Conference on AI Consciousness and Welfare, November 21-23, 2025, stating that, “Eleos AI Research is proud to announce the first Eleos Conference on AI Consciousness and Welfare (Eleos ConCon). We want to encourage thoughtful discussion around AI welfare, foster further research collaborations, and build a robust network of people who take AI welfare seriously. There are so many questions that remain unanswered in this still-nascent field, and this workshop is an opportunity to connect with AI researchers, neuroscientists, academics, philosophers, policymakers, and members of the press over 1:1s, breakout groups, panels, a poster session, and talks.”
This article was written for WHN by David Stephen, who currently does research in conceptual brain science with a focus on the electrical and chemical signals for how they mechanize the human mind, with implications for mental health, disorders, neurotechnology, consciousness, learning, artificial intelligence, and nurture. He was a visiting scholar in medical entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL. He did computer vision research at Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona.
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