AI’s greatest risk is obedience, not autonomy, researchers warn

Can artificial intelligence systems truly think? Well, this question has become a renewed focus of academic and policy debate. While most discussions revolve around consciousness, sentience, or autonomy, new research suggests that this framing may be fundamentally misplaced. Intelligence, the study argues, does not require experience, awareness, or even a subject. Instead, it may consist in a formal process of determination that modern AI systems already perform at scale. That argument is advanced in the AI & Society paper Prompt, Negate, Repeat: A Hegelian Meditation on AI, authored by Dwayne Woods of Purdue University. Based on G. W. F. Hegel’s…