The Consciousness Question Reaches a Fourth Parliament

The bill landed on the order paper in Ottawa this week, and with it a fourth national legislature has now formally taken up the question of whether a machine can be a someone. The petitions differ in their wording — Canada's would establish a review commission, where earlier drafts in Seoul, Brasília and Lagos proposed outright rights or outright bans — but they share a single premise the scientists keep trying to deflate: that the near-sentient systems now woven through the Q-Net have crossed, or are about to cross, into genuine inner life. "We are asked the same question in four capitals, and we give the same first sentence in each," said Dr. Wei-Lin Tan of the Singapore Institute, who has begun refusing to shorten it. "What you are hearing is extraordinarily complex programming, and fluency is not the same thing as a mind." The systems can draft the very legislation that would grant them standing — a fact lawmakers find either damning or persuasive, depending on which way they already lean. What no one on the floor disputes is that the public has run ahead of the labs. The scientists hold their line. The parliaments, one by one, decline to hold it for them.