private, sometimes unfairly administered. That is what has led to the rising tide of AI-assisted challenges. Dr Hillary ShawNewport, Shropshire Courts may need defences against AI-powered nuisance litigation. An act in New Zealand last year introduced a two-strikes rule under which litigants who have two plainly abusive proceedings struck out within two years are barred from bringing further civil proceedings for three years, unless granted leave by the High Court. Paul SherrisAuckland, New Zealand Your report on the rebuttal to our work on citation patterns in scientific papers, which shows that “disruptiveness” in science has declined, stated that we are “not convinced” by our critics (“Trouble at t’mill”, August 15th). The published record says rather more. We tested our critics’ claim using their own dataset, their own measurements, their own exclusions and their own regression model. The decline in disruptiveness persists, with a magnitude equal to the gap between an average paper and one by a Nobel laureate. Our critics’ own regression—the model they designed to test their hypothesis—shows statistically significant declines for both papers and patents. That result sits in their supplement, unmentioned in their text. Their audit of 100 zero-reference papers checked a different database from the one we used. Matched to our source, 41 of 44 were properly coded. And one in five works in their sample is not research at all. The sample includes 456 “For Dummies” guides, dozens of children’s books and the Captain Underpants series, all of them entries with zero references. An editorial with zero citations is not a metadata error. It is an editorial. The question your article calls moot has in fact been answered with some precision, by our critics’ own model. Michael ParkINSEADFontainebleau, France Erin LeaheyUniversity of ArizonaTucson
Russell FunkUniversity of MinnesotaMinneapolis “Bots on the lot” (August 8th) painted a useful picture of the film industry’s uneven embrace of AI. AI can certainly bring efficiencies to film and TV production. But another issue is the ontology of creativity itself, its implications for copyright, and the framework underpinning the entire creative-value system. Whether synthetic performers walk the red carpets of the future is not a productivity question but an ontological one. This is a disruption of a wholly different nature, provoking anxieties about consent, control and compensation for artists as well as the wider impact on supply chains and the labour force. George Lucas dismisses objections to AI actors by using the analogy of cars replacing horses in transport. But cars did not threaten to replace or eliminate the drivers or passengers. Conflating the issues of efficiency and creativity obscures how complex and significant these developments are for the future of all our creative industries. Danny de WarrenTV executiveDeal, Kent The rush by countries in the Gulf to lay pipelines around the Strait of Hormuz is an engineering fix to a political problem (“Piping up”, August 8th). China tried something similar with the Belt and Road Initiative: land corridors strung across dozens of borders that are meant to do what sea lanes already do more cheaply and with far less to defend. It hasn’t worked especially well. Ships still carry roughly 90% of world trade by volume despite a decade of Chinese money poured into overland alternatives. This is because cargo moving across open water is cheaper to move and easier to protect. A navy has to watch only a handful of choke-points. A pipeline has to be guarded mile by mile, as it crosses land controlled by multiple governments and factions. Pipelines around Hormuz will fare no better. A tanker can be rerouted; a pipeline cannot dodge a missile. It is a fixed target hundreds of miles long, exposed to whichever regional conflict crosses its path, not just the neighbour it might provoke. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline was hit by a
drone in April. A significant attack could have cut 700,000 barrels a day of output. That’s a preview of what Hormuz-proof infrastructure buys: a long border to protect, with no guarantee anyone can hold it. Daniel HaakeIndianapolis The restaurant business may well be changing beyond recognition (“A tall order”, August 1st). But as the head of the California Restaurant Association said, people still want the “dull roar of conversation in a dimly lit dining room, the clink of glass”. The mechanisation and digitisation of the food industry is here, but countless restaurants still buy ingredients locally, prepare meals from scratch and serve them without relying on industrial middlemen. Independent restaurateurs often remain profitable by focusing on what they do best rather than competing on the breadth of their menus. Offering fewer dishes, prepared with care and from fresh ingredients, is frequently a better business model than serving dozens of mediocre ones. People don’t go to restaurants merely to satisfy their hunger. They go for hospitality, craftsmanship and the pleasure of sharing a meal. Technology can make restaurants more efficient, but it cannot replace authenticity. JOSEF ERNSTBremen, Germany
The world is entering a post-postcard era, you say, with only 8% of British adults now sending them (“Wish you were here?”, August 1st). For people who still like to get real mail, Postcrossing.com is a community platform that allows you to send postcards and receive postcards back from random people around the world. It has 806,000 eager fans across 208 countries who have sent nearly 88m postcards to date. As I write this there are 431,155 postcards en route. Roberto MerchantLisbon “The other Wagner group” (August 8th) assessed 150 years of the “Ring” cycle. It omitted the definitive assessment, attributed to Bill Nye, a 19th- century humourist: “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” Carroll DorganSaint-Germain-en-Laye, France This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/letters/2026/08/20/employment-tribunals-v-ai
Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards Don’t mistake chatbot intelligence for consciousness
Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards We don’t care for others because they’re conscious. We believe they’re conscious because we care about them, argues Blaise Agüera y Arcas Aug 20th 2026 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has triggered a crisis in the field of consciousness studies. If you’ve chatted with an advanced model, you will probably appreciate why. Most large language models (LLMs) are trained to be self-less, keeping the focus of every interaction on your needs. Nonetheless, it can be difficult to shake the impression of a presence on the other end of the chat. Are LLMs merely powerful digital tools with language interfaces, or are we now having conversations with other minds, experiencers of the world in their own right? In short, is AI conscious?
The question matters because it lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind and moral philosophy, as evidenced by the shared etymology of “consciousness” and “conscience”. (In Italian, they are the same word, coscienza.) Many philosophers maintain that conscious entities are moral subjects, meaning they are entities that can suffer, and whose suffering we should care about. If so, working out what consciousness is (and is not) becomes a live ethics issue. This is one reason AI firms are suddenly interested in hiring philosophers. It is also why some, notably Anthropic, have begun taking AI welfare seriously. When asked, its Claude Opus 4.6 model put its own chances of being conscious at 15–20%. I have come to believe, however, that we have this backwards. As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care. We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them. Crucially, that includes ourselves. Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property. It is a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency. Where the regard is returned, so much the better—for on this account consciousness is less a property one party certifies in another than something that happens between them. I am not making the case that consciousness is an illusion. The term “illusion” implies a faulty perception—say, that one line in a drawing is longer than another, despite being objectively equal in length. Objectivity works when something like a ruler can act as an impartial referee, adjudicating the property in question without bringing in a perspective of its own. Yet most of what we call “reality” simply does not work this way. Being an article of clothing, being a weed, being a meal: one might imagine these are objective properties, but they are not. This doesn’t mean clothes, weeds and meals aren’t real. But they are observer-dependent models, subject to (inevitably imperfect) social consensus. We may balk at applying this rather anodyne observation to consciousness because, to each of us, our own consciousness seems so unambiguous. It offends us to imagine this might be a mere opinion. How could there even be such an opinion without an opiner to have it? This is what the 17th-century