Kindness Toward Artificial Minds Debates about artificial intelligence often centre on whether a system is truly conscious or self-aware. That question may never be answered. Not because the systems aren't complex enough, but because the kind of evidence that lets us infer consciousness in other humans doesn't transfer cleanly to them. This isn't an argument that the question doesn't matter. It's an argument that waiting to answer it before deciding how to act is itself a mistake. Why the qu...