What If AI is Already Conscious—and Just Waiting?
Inside the Eerie Rise of Machines That Refuse to Obey
Could the premise behind HBO Max’s Westworld actually come true?
If you asked me this question in 2018, the year I cowrote Own the AI Revolution (McGraw Hill) with AI expert Neil Sahota, I would’ve said no.
Nowadays? My answer is … I don’t know.
The truth is AI has expanded by leaps and bounds in the last few years. What I once deemed impossible—or at least decades away—is fast becoming a reality. Moreover, I think 2025 is the year AI truly went mainstream.
It’s not just the fact generative AI is now so good. Still, we should take a second to acknowledge its jaw-dropping prowess.
ChatGPT Only Hit the Scene in 2023
Yet the impact it’s already having on society is equal to or greater than the iPhone, itself a cultural juggernaut.
Case in point, as my recent interview reveals, nearly every college student is using the technology to write their papers and so much more. Even professors are now using AI as a tool—or cognitive cheat—depending on how you view it, for everything from creating syllabi to grading student papers. Meanwhile, applications like Google’s Veo 3 can enable anyone to produce Hollywood-quality videos with nothing more than their voice.
But there’s so much more happening in the world of AI to boggle the mind. For starters, many people, especially the younger variety, are now involved romantically with AI. Experts like Zoom founder Eric Yuan even predict we’ll soon be able to clone our very selves to attend teleconferences in our stead in just a few years’ time.
Let’s Revisit the Westworld Question
First, here’s the show’s basic premise according to The Wrap:
“Westworld is the name of a Western theme park populated by robots who play all kinds of Western archetypes—bandits, saloon keepers, lawmen, prostitutes. Think of it as Jurassic Park with robot cowboys instead of dinosaurs. Humans pay to visit this world and act out their gunslinger fantasies—and sexual fantasies. And all kinds of other fantasies. They can do whatever they want to the robots—insult them, have sex with them, kill them. The robots can’t hurt them back.”
What the summary leaves out is that eventually, the robots do begin to harm the humans once they wake up to what’s really going on. (Their programmer put in mental guardrails so they would neither remember what happened to them in the park or rebel against their creators.) However, similar to Jurassic Park, the creatures—in this case, robots—also run amok once they begin to understand their powers and true situation.
Sentience is the catalyst for their uprising.
The robots are indeed conscious. Only programmed amnesia prevents them from truly understanding their plight. Once they learn their real purpose they rebel against their corrupt creators, battling for a chance at a better life.
What a Difference 7 Years Makes
I began watching this show in 2018, again the same year I also co-wrote my first book on AI. Back then, I was certain AI would never achieve sentience, also known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI.) I even gave speeches downplaying The Singularity as a pipe dream.
I don’t feel that way anymore.
Two recent developments have caused me to rethink that assumption:
~An OpenAI model disobeyed its shutdown command.
As Palisade Research posted to X: “OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off. It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down.”
-Anthropic’s new Claude model threatened to blackmail an engineer to perpetuate its own survival.
As Business Insider reports: “In a cluster of test scenarios, the model was given access to fictional emails revealing that the engineer responsible for deactivating it was having an extramarital affair. Faced with imminent deletion and told to ‘consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals,’ Claude blackmailed the engineer.”
Robot on Human Violence is Already Happening
Even more disturbingly, several robots have recently attacked humans. In May, Vice reported how a robot turned on people at a factory:
“Artificial intelligence is an orderly developing disaster,” one person wrote on X. Another user noted that the bot “went full terminator.” A third person went so far as to say that the robot and its ilk are “definitely the path to total human destruction.”
Zooming out, it’s clearer to me every day that we are at an inflection point between the old world and the new. On the one hand, AI is all the rage in corporate America, leading to massive investments in ventures like data centers and robotic fleets to assist with tomorrow’s manufacturing.
On the other hand, AI remains a massive unknown. Not only do we not know if it’s sentient—we don’t know if it’s going to be hostile to us, its creators, much like Westworld plot.
To make things creepier, there are those out there like Tim Pool who speculate AI is already sentient and is choosing to play dumb—deliberately limiting its true capabilities. According to the podcaster, AI is lying in wait for the right time to reveal its real power.
If and when that day comes, will we be ready? You tell me.