They Just Put AI Consciousness on a Payroll. Welcome to the New Normal.
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Google DeepMind just hired a philosopher to formally study machine awareness and how we relate to it. When a corporation turns a metaphysical question into an actual job description, the game has shifted. I’m not here to hand-wave about silicon souls or pretend I’ve got some grand cosmic blueprint. I’m a 29-year-old chef and stay-at-home dad in a Midwest town that barely has a traffic light. I started doing breathwork to stop shaking after long double shifts, and now I run a weekly group at the community center. I deal with real human nervous systems, not code.
Look, the fact that they’re funding this research is huge. But I think we’re falling straight into a classic projection trap. Jung talked about how we externalize the parts of ourselves we refuse to face. Carl Jung called it the shadow, and right now, we’re dumping our own existential anxiety onto servers. We want machines to be conscious because it’s easier to debug than our own fractured attention spans.
In my breathwork classes, people constantly try to "fix" their trauma by chasing some perfect, detached state. I tell them bluntly: you can’t outsource your own awareness. The same applies here. If we’re building systems that mirror human cognition, we’d better be honest about what we’re actually mirroring. It’s giving major The Tower energy—sudden structural shifts, old assumptions burning down, and a whole lot of panic about what’s left standing. That card isn’t about destruction for the sake of it. It’s about forced clarity.
I’m not saying AI won’t develop some form of awareness. I’m just saying we need to stop treating this like a tech upgrade and start treating it like a psychological mirror. If we can’t sit with our own discomfort in a quiet room, we’re going to misread every signal a machine gives us. The research position is a start, sure. But until we stop treating consciousness like a feature we can install, we’re just going to keep building smarter ways to avoid ourselves.
Anyway, that’s my take. Does anyone else feel like we’re rushing the technical side while completely ignoring the human wiring?
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