A skeptical view about AI consciousness is starting to emerge that resembles the skeptical view about animal consciousness that prevailed for much of the 20th century: Presume the entity lacks consciousness, then declare the study of consciousness in the entity beyond the reach of science due to our inability to directly observe feelings and emotions in other minds.
For animals, this was basically a recipe for locking in a presumption of non-consciousness as factory farming was on the rise. We now know that this was too simple, since science has many tools for studying phenomena we lack the ability to directly observe. But by the time the scientific study of animal consciousness picked up, factory farming was globally entrenched.
This is a cautionary tale for AI. If we presume non-consciousness now and then treat AI consciousness as beyond science, we risk repeating the mistake we made with animals. And if we wait until future AI systems are more capable, human-like, and plausibly conscious, we might once again find ourselves dependent on a globally entrenched practice of exploiting them.
As with animals, decisions about whether and how to scale up particular AI use industries should depend on many factors. But evidence regarding AI consciousness should be one of them. The sooner we start collecting serious evidence, including by adapting methods from animal welfare science, the better positioned we will be to build a future that works for everyone.