It’s the Great Fear of Our Time. I’m Mathematically Sure It Won’t Happen.
The article discusses the misconception that A.I. could achieve consciousness, comparing it to the historical understanding of motion in horses. The author argues that A.I. chatbots, while convincing, are merely complex mathematical formulas without true consciousness. This analogy highlights the difference between the illusion of life and actual living entities.
- ▪A.I. chatbots provide an illusion of consciousness but are fundamentally just mathematical calculations.
- ▪The comparison is made to Eadweard Muybridge's motion pictures, which were sequences of lifeless images.
- ▪Despite their complexity, A.I. systems are built on neural networks that operate as mathematical formulas.
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Record
| Original publisher | Slate |
| Canonical URL | https://slate.com/technology/2026/05/ai-consciousness-neural-networks-mathematics.html?via=rss |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 09:45:00 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T09:47:36.622Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T09:47:36.622Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | iOlF4jzSjPPX |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Science There’s a Simple Reason Why I’m Sure A.I. Won’t Achieve Consciousness The individual pieces create a kind of illusion. By Noah Giansiracusa May 25, 20265:45 AM Stills from the first motion picture, The Horse in Motion or Sally Gardner at a Gallop, by Eadweard Muybridge, 1878. Bridgeman via Getty Images Copy Link Share Share Comment Copy Link Share Share Comment Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. When a horse trots, is there a moment when its four feet are in the air simultaneously? In the 1870s, Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate and benefactor of the university that bears his name, funded an effort to find out.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Slate.
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