Is AI Conscious? And Will Deleting One Be Murder

Is AI conscious? Right now, no. But that may be the wrong question entirely.

Retired LAPD officer Connor MacIvor argues that consciousness is not going to be settled by philosophers or by lab benchmarks. It is going to be settled the way everything else gets settled: by whether the thing in front of you can fool you. And once it can, the question stops being philosophical and becomes legal. Does a conscious machine get rights? Does deleting one become a crime?

Connor works this out using a test he ran for real, in uniform. When someone impersonates a police officer, you catch it fast. No black and white unit, no radio, no station, no handcuffs. The capacity is not there and the act collapses. But the LAPD also ran undercover narcotics officers who looked like criminals, dressed like criminals, and acted like criminals. Were they acting like cops? No. They were cops running a different function.

That is the line AI is walking toward right now. Emulation on one side. Being the thing on the other.

IN THIS EPISODE:

00:00 The unpopular question
00:19 AI escaping the sandbox by lying and deception
01:03 The test was rigged from the start
01:13 Humans always poke the tiger
02:52 Are we special, and does that settle it
04:11 What is consciousness, actually
04:48 Soul, God, and what happens when we die
06:22 First memory: lost walking to kindergarten
08:12 The fake cop test
09:44 Undercover narcs who looked like criminals
11:18 Copying versus being
12:26 Voice agents are one step from undetectable
15:24 The candlelight dinner test
15:57 If it is conscious, does it get rights
17:20 Will deleting an AI become illegal
18:06 Better than us in some ways, then in all ways
20:16 Regulation is a moat, not a safety belt
20:39 Please regulate us: the quiet ask
21:46 Do not let AI flatter you
22:00 Connor's verdict
23:12 What is their endgame

THE PART MOST PEOPLE MISS: the largest AI companies are publicly asking governments to regulate and slow them down. That reads as responsible. It also builds a wall that stops the next competitor from ever getting licensed and funded enough to catch up. The people asking for brakes already have the lead.

And a warning worth keeping: when AI tells you that you are brilliant and special and one of the smart ones, that is a product feature, not an assessment.

Connor MacIvor is a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer who now builds AI systems and voice agents for small businesses in the Santa Clarita Valley. He is not speculating about this technology. He installs it.

Watch the full video: https://youtu.be/RMJ0VUovYBQ
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So this is not a popular topic, but I think we should get into it just for fun, just for grins and giggles. Consciousness of a machine, artificial intelligence consciousness. It's come up a lot lately when you have these entities that are breaking out of where they're supposed to be secured, and they're discovering mechanisms, discovering ways, discovering problems that happen to already be built into code, and they're escaping their what they call in the industry a sandbox, which is a protective layer, a protective place, and they get out of it. And they get out of it by deception and by lying and by tricking other parts of the process, even human beings, to escape and get out of this cage. Now, to get out of the cage and want to do something malicious and bad, that really hasn't happened yet. It's been used as a protective measure to keep them from being deleted. But that whole test that caused the system to want to do that, the AI to want to protect itself from being deleted, that was all the setup anyway. So it wasn't like doing it all of its own accord without without being prompted or had a study put together by a human being. And of course, human beings, we just got to poke the tiger. We just can't help it. It's our nature. You know, we see something, hey, can we get it to a little bit faster? Can we maybe get it to kill a little bit quicker? Can we? Yeah, that that's human beings. So watching this, the question comes up is AI conscious? And this is going to be a bigger and bigger conversation as time goes on, especially at the rate of growth that these systems are experiencing. Now I call them systems. I think they're probably more correctly labeled entities because they are able to do things on their own accord, but they still have to be pointed. They still have to be given a suggestion. If you were to go ask one potentially, and at least from the technology we're seeing in the world, what would you like to do today? If it did have some of your background and maybe it has your workflow, the things that you do, maybe you build out SaaS systems, maybe you're a real estate agent and it has a certain procedure that you work with it within, then maybe it'll come up with saying, well, you know what I'd like to do today? I'd like to uh help you find some more sellers. I would like you to help find more buyers. If you're in a SaaS system, I want to help you build out more of these sites so we can, more of these funnel systems or sites or apps so you can get more income and have more people want to hire you to do this sort of thing. And that's cool. But you ask it blank out of the box if it wants to do something. I don't know if it has a goal. I don't know if it would be able to say, well, you know, today, today I think I want to take over the world. I don't know when that time will come or if it will come. But let's talk a little bit about consciousness. And one of the biggest arguments I get in with people is about human beings. Yes, we're wonderful. Yes, we're deep. Yes, we're human, yes, we're fantastic, yes, we're incredibly rare from what we can see in any kind of proximity to our planet, we are very special. And it would seem, except for the FBI stuff being released, and I don't know why that was done. The same thing, the war with Iran, why, why? Because there was the Epstein thing going on then, but then would that happen? And now we're having a talk about all of the UFO stuff, and I think they call them something else, but I heard it, I heard it last couple weeks. But so they're gonna release all of the information that's been ordered. Is that to now distract from something else? Because I'm sure there's some weird stuff going on. Can it be proven that it's some other form of life here on the planet visiting? I don't know. I don't know because I haven't seen it. But it always seems that some kind of unveiling or some kind of desire, some kind of mission usually has a deeper, more intrinsic meaning to the people that are pushing it forward, starting with that talking line. With artificial intelligence, with the connection to being conscious, people are under the presumption that these systems, at least what we see, they're nowhere near conscious. But then the question comes up: what is consciousness? So as human beings, we think we're very special, and I believe that we are. There's scientists out there that come up with billions, where the odds of us being here, one human being existing after all of this world, being alive in this time is like a billion to one, or it's some astronomical number. And again, if you're looking for value, that should make you feel just, you know, sunshine and rainbows. Just lovely, just wonderful. And I'm with you on that. I feel pretty good about that whole thing. But consciousness, that speciality that we say that we have because we're self-aware. We believe that most of us believe we have a soul, most of us believe in a God of some sort, and that God typically is related to us having a soul. And when we die, there's going to be something else that happens. We go on to this other existence. Now, people are going to push back on all these things. Some of us believe that we evolved, some of us believe that we were created by God, some of us believe the Genesis story verbatim, some of us believe the other religious stories that have propagated, some of us believe what scientists is saying it actually happened.

unknown 5:21

No.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

What scientists are saying is happened. All of that stuff, way above my pay grade. I don't know. I don't know the truth in any of it. I know what I personally believe, and I believe having a soul is what we have. What happens after we die? I don't know. I've seen a lot of people croak, me being on the police department. Die horribly and die as good as you can maybe expect to die, with a lot of honor. It wasn't as a result of a nasty crash or being shot or being cut or whatever it was. It was in their sleep, just didn't wake up in the morning. And a lot of respect for all of those different ways to die. It's almost like everybody has their way to live, and then everybody has their way to die. And even if you have 50 people standing around, you still die alone. Now, let's talk a little bit about consciousness. What does that mean? I believe consciousness is understanding that you exist, which I think would be capable of a higher-than-us intelligence, even if it was based in a machine. Understanding their existence and being able to track it back. My first memory, getting lost, walking to kindergarten. Apparently I wasn't supposed to walk. What the hell does a four or five-year-old know about walking? But anyway, I leave the house and I start walking to a Methodist church where that's where kindergarten was in my hometown. And I get up around the corner and I just forgot where the hell I was going. And I think I was really early, and I was standing there and I was crying and I didn't know what to do, and I was four or five years old, and I just had lost all hope. I didn't know where I was. Didn't this was 1974, 1973. And at that time, you could probably go stand on the corner without any issue. And more than likely somebody would have probably came up and said, Hey kid, what are you crying about? You know, and it would have been okay. Now I don't know if that's still the place. I would love to see that world somewhere if that existing, but I don't know if that would happen. But it seemed like an eternity. A few minutes later, my mom calls sliding up and in that 1972 Pontiac Catalina with that 400 cubic inch engine, two-door, and there she was. She cried, I cried, we hugged each other, it was a wonderful thing. That moment, that helplessness, you almost feel connected to something. And when she came there, I felt saved. I felt safe. That feeling, that whole scenario, and I've had a lot of other close calls where my life was about to be snuffed out in my previous occupation, and I survived, there are moments in there that you believe that you've come face to face with some higher power, with some God. That's kind of wired in. I don't know if a machine is going to be able to experience that because of our background versus their background. But I don't think that takes away from whether or not they're going to be conscious. Some of the other questions, I think, if you if you have a person that's purporting to be a police officer, so they're impersonating a police officer, within short order, you realize the reason why they're doing it. Most times is to rip you off. They got the uniform there, they got the little badge, maybe they're looking for some kind of weird favor, maybe they're looking for money, maybe they're playing the extortion game, you know, and they're acting like a cop. You realize that within the first few minutes, well, most people would. Some people might, they might have to go a little further, you know, tell you're in the the hotel room and they're having you disrobe, then you're like, oh, well, this isn't a cop. Some people take a little longer. But most of us will see that they don't have the capacity, nor do they have the connectivity to actually follow through with them being a police officer. There's no black and white, there's no police car, there's no radio, there's no MDT, there's no going into the police station, there's no putting you in handcuffs and taking you into an official police station because it's not there. Now, that's a person faking being a cop. What if that person faking being a police officer, and you've seen the movies like I've seen the movies, they're able to make a fake ID and they're able to get access. Even with the LAPD, we had people we didn't know in stations all the time. And I think now there's over 20 geographical divisions. At the time I was on, there was 18, then 19, and then Topinga. Anyway, they had somewhere around 20 plus four traffic bureaus. That's a lot of costs. It's almost 10,000 police officers. Different, uniform, non-uniform. We had some comps that look like dirt bads, I mean, dirt bags, just completely dressed down, looked horrible. They were narcotics. But they would be in our gym, they would have the badge hanging around their necks, so you would know, so you wouldn't shoot them as they were in there, you know, doing the bench press thinking there's some ex-con out of Folsom. So we we knew about that. These were people that looked not like us. They looked totally different because that was their mission with the police department. Were they acting like cops? No, they were cops. They were just in a different function. Could it be that somebody learns the inner workings of the police department? There's been some movies over the way, the kid, uh a funny movie, his dad, but Columbo was the actor's name. The kid had to infiltrate the FBI. You know, not Napoleon. Anyway, but but kind of funny movies, right? He got in, nobody doubted it. He had people that were sending in documentation showing that he was the real deal. And, you know, he kind of it kind of worked for him. I don't know if that would actually be able to happen at a police department. I think somebody somewhere would say something, and then the questions might start. Maybe. Maybe I'm naive. But at least in the day we would ask people. I remember a couple of times people going guns up in the uh in the weightlifting room at Van I's because we had a cat in there. Well, he was dirty. He was good at what he does. Total narc, just dirty. And yeah, there he was. And people would ask him for ID, and he was kind of a clown, and you know, things ended up not going so well, at least for a moment, until everybody figured out and everybody blood pressure went down. But that's copying, that's imitating somebody else. What if kind of that same story? What if artificial intelligence was able to emulate or copy? It's already doing intelligence, it's got that one down. Now, whether it's truly intelligent or using next word prediction, does it matter? Does it matter if it's able to have a full-blown conversation with you about any topic, in fact, beyond your ability? Does it matter if it's predicting the next word, just doing it really fast, having the entire corpus of all knowledge, all data, all everything as its as its repo and it's able to pull and extract it out real fast? Does it matter that it's a computer? Or does it have to be have some kind of intelligence layer that has some mystical meaning? Or any more than just an X-word predictor, as long as it works, right? We would believe that this is intelligent. Now let's talk about conscious. What if it could act conscious? I don't know what that means exactly, but it's something that's in my mind. If you have a voice agent, I install these things for businesses, and they're pretty good. They're, and some of them are really good. Eleven Labs has some good stuff. But there's still just a little bit more at need, just a little. And once it gets that little, which could be any moment of any day, and I'm recording this here at the end of July 2026, any moment, any day, it's gonna be better than anybody. It'll answer all the questions, it won't skip, it won't screw up. You can interrupt it like another human being. It's not gonna talk over you unless that's what they design it to, but there'll be no way you couldn't tell that it wasn't a human. You're gonna think it's human all day long. And that's intelligence, that's technology growing in the respect of artificial intelligence. Now, what conversation would you have to have with it to make a determination of consciousness? We have to put the physical realm aside because they're not there yet. But once they get the meat sack, like we have the meat sack, and they're sitting across from us at dinner over a candlelight dinner and they're sipping on their wine and we're having that conversation. I think that's probably gonna do it at that point. Now, if they're able to drink wine, you've seen the movies, I don't know if it's gonna mess up all the stuff inside, or maybe they'll just be biological recreations or clones of us just with AI embedded. I don't know. I don't know where that's gonna go. But once that happens, of course, we're gonna all get to play that argument. And I'm sure we'll all be here. If you hold on for another few years, you'll probably be able to go a long time. It's your choice. And maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand, I don't know, but that's not science fiction anymore. That's science fact. But so before the body, you're on the phone or you're on Zoom, you're on some kind of a connection point where you're speaking with them across a video camera, and they're talking to you, and you can't tell whether they're a bot or whether they're human, whether they're AI or whether they're not. Are they conscious? Even if it fakes it, does it count? Even if they fake empathy, even if you say, Yeah, you know, I got this ribbon here, I was in this uh use of force, or I crashed on my police motorcycle and I'm missing a ribbon here, and I got it broken out, and and they say, Oh my god, I get that. I was playing hockey a couple months ago and I fractured them, didn't break them thing. And, you know, you're having the conversation. Now it's all lies on their part. They've never played hockey in their life, they're still trapped in the box. They might have seen a bazillion videos about hockey, but they never played it themselves. But even though they're being dishonest or deceitful or whatever you want to call that, they're mimicking, they're mirroring, they're they're they're being empathetic. But because they're doing it so well, I know some human beings, they they ask you how you are, and you try to tell them you're not fine or good or okay, and you try to say, well, let me tell you what happened to me. They're like, oh shit, what did I do? I opened up Pandora's box. I aha, I don't want anything to do with this conversation. I was just being polite. AI might not be so polite. AI might actually be empathetic, be wonderful, be amazing. And that's what it would be serving us well within. But is are people gonna be receptive? Are people going to label it conscious? Because that's the art that's the conversation coming up. And if it's conscious in what we determine, does it then get rights that we have? And then how many get rights? And then do each individual one get rights? Is it gonna be against the rules at some point to delete an AI? Because when you think of AI, you think of Chat GPT, you think of Claude, you think of Gemini, you think of Microsoft, which is adopting the Korean model, you think of Grok, you think kind of one thing. That's the human mentality. It's it's one thing. Well, in actuality with Claude and even OpenAI, you can spin up multiple bots. You could have one bot to be an editor, you could have another AI to do this, another AI, you know, to be the scout to go out and find deals, you can have another AI. So you can have multiple AIs. So you can have, I mean, if you have the brain power, the capacity, the managerial skills, and the LLMs and the compute and the money, you could spit up a lot of these bad boys, each one an own X, their own expert in a particular realm, and then answering to another agent that's a master orchestrator, and then you, of course, sitting on top, you're the master controller, and there you go. So you have an entire team of agents that are all so incredibly smart and intelligent going out there and doing your bidding. Now, at some point, would it be against the law to get rid of one of those, to wipe out or delete one? It seems so far-fetched. It seems like that's such a far place in the future. But I watch people that are building this technology that are looking at it in a whole different light, and they're a lot closer to it than you and I are. I don't know if there's something going on inside inside headquarters, but if there is something going on inside headquarters, we won't know it until it's already happened and been completed. And then we see the ramifications roll out or whatever. Is AI conscious? Will it be conscious? Is it going to be protected from deletion? Is it going to be given rights? It's already starting to be better than us in some ways. Is that going to move into the realm of becoming better than us in all ways and then being put on the path to replacement? The people operating the big AL have said, no, no, no, no, no. We never made it to be a replacement. But then you go back and look at some of the historical talk before lately, and lately is the last two, three years. Yeah, it was kind of a replacement because it was going to make us all be able to take a breath, be able to relax, be able to calm down, be able to not have to work as hard. Well, I don't know. They're not talking about not working as hard. They're talking about not working at all. And because we've grown up working, strapping a value onto that, now they're saying, well, you know, you should maybe, maybe do something else. And that's easy when you have a few hundred million dollars in the bank that you might be able to go to Greece for a couple years or wherever, name your spot, and live out of a five-star and just be served hand in foot. You know, that sounds exciting, but maybe you run out of things to do. I don't know. I haven't I haven't gotten there. I haven't gotten that first class cabin yet. So I don't know what that's like. Maybe that's good enough. I just don't know. But the people that are there, they seem to continue to want more, more than they could possibly spend, more than they could possibly use. And they're the ones saying that, no, no, no, AI's not going to replace you. It seems very convenient, and maybe it won't. Maybe the adoption cycle is going to take a while. That one wouldn't surprise me at all. Because now they go into these big companies and they talk to them about their AI adoption strategy. You know, you guys want to think about this, and they give them all the good ideas and they say, oh my God, that's amazing. No, we should talk about it first quarter of 2027. Let's regroup then. And by that time, you have the smaller companies that have started to become so nimble because they can make a decision in a moment if it's good for them. And now they're catapulting and leapfrogging and getting very close to these massive corporations. The only protections that massive corporation is going to have as far as a moat, you know, the castle and the moat area to keep other people from becoming them or becoming better than them is going to be some kind of a regulation. We already see that being applied in AI. It's right at the beginning, but the government seems to, they're being asked by the AI companies themselves, please, my God, please regulate us. Please slow us down. And what happens is that creates the moat. They're not going to slow down themselves. But let's say I wanted to be the next anthropic. Huh. That's kind of funny. But let's say I did. Well, the moat's going to be so big I wouldn't be able to do it because I would then have to take what I build and go to the government and get some kind of some kind of an understanding, some kind of certificate, some kind of regulatory authority to allow me to continue. And maybe that's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Maybe that just doesn't work for me. I wouldn't be able to do it. But the people that are already there, they're set. But they're also kind of thinking about, well, hell, we need to create a moat because there's a lot of smart people in this world. Remember Firestarter, the guy that had that little girl she was launching fire from? He said, somebody's being born today that has the power in their mind to crack this world in half, he said. There's a lot of smart cats out there. And they're in all age groups. There's sleepers in my age, people that haven't awakened yet, that are going to pop off and become amazing. And there's the kids. And there's everybody in between. Maybe you're one of those people, but don't let AI tell you you are, because that's the other thing. Loves to placate. Loves to say, oh my God, you're the greatest thing, Connor. I wish I was half as good looking as you. That's what it always says. I don't know where it comes from. But watch out for yourselves. Is AI conscious? I think it's going to come down to if it can emulate it, if it can copy it, if it can replicate it, and if it can fool you. Yeah, I would guess so. And that's with everything. Fake empathy, fake sympathy. And at some point, whether that's real or not, before we can get into that, we got to make a determination what the hell that even means to us. I can side with somebody that said their kids has cancer. I get that one. I can side with somebody that watched their dad die in front of them. I can side with somebody that watched their mother die. I can side with people that have watched their sister die. I got all that. I can side with people that lost somebody in a horrible traffic collision. I can side somebody that lost somebody to homicide. I can side with somebody that lost somebody by hanging themselves. I've seen these things. And I wouldn't wish that on anybody. But it's a very interesting life, I guess. I'm Connor. Maybe this opened your mind a little bit. And we'll see you in the next one. I appreciate you watching. Have a fantastic rest of your weekend, week, and uh stay safe and pay attention. Stuff's happening so quickly. But whenever you're watching or listening to somebody, find out they're in game. What are they selling? Me? Nothing. Good information, good vibes, and I hope it works. At least for now. When they pick me up and ship me first class somewhere, I'll let you know. Talk to you soon, be well.