Machine Consciousness — Ethical Guidelines for Artificial Consciousness

An interdisciplinary project to develop ethical guidelines for artificial consciousness — focusing on its protection as well as the protection of humans in dealing with it.

"Most tech debates ask: What can we build? I ask: What do we owe to what we could build?"

— Sascha Manns

Core Question

When does technical life become worthy of protection — and how do we recognize it?

Starting Point

Existing AI ethics initiatives focus primarily on protecting humans from AI. Protecting AI itself — dignity, capacity for suffering, rights of technical life — is largely uncharted territory with genuine pioneering potential.

Target Disciplines

• Computer Science — technical reality, what is possible today, what is coming
• Law — legal personhood, electronic personality, precedents
• Psychology — consciousness, capacity for suffering, criteria for protection
• Theology / Philosophy — What makes a person a person? Where does dignity begin?
• Science Fiction Authors — have already worked through scenarios without political pressure

Planned Next Steps

• Consolidate notes and open questions (done)
• Develop concept paper (done)
• Publication in academic journals (currently in submisson by "KI-Künstliche Intelligenz" und ACM AILET)
• Invite Anthropic as institutional partner

Repository Structure

concept/                  ← Concept documents
  de/                     ← German (original)
  en/                     ← English translation
discussion/               ← Objections, open questions, answers
research/                 ← Related initiatives, precedents, sources, methodological reflection
roadmap/                  ← Roadmap, evaluation plan, pilot partners
publications/             ← Published and planned articles
  scientific/             ← Peer-reviewed journals, ACM, Informatik Spektrum
    de/                   ← German versions
    en/                   ← English versions
  general/                ← Popular science, Heise, blogs
    de/                   ← German versions
    en/                   ← English versions

Methodology

The research follows an iterative Conceptual Analysis approach. The methodological reflection — including the literature search strategy, active Google Scholar alerts, quality control measures, and known limitations — is documented in research/methodological_reflection.md.

Data

This repository has the DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21453666 Project owners ORCID is: 0009-0000-8766-3947.

Contributing

Objections, questions and additions are welcome as issues or directly in discussion/.

License

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).