Robot wars are brewing between AI lovers and haters, philosophers have warned.
Vicious spats are on the horizon because some people will insist the bots have rights and feelings and others will claim they don’t.
Professor Jonathan Birch, of the London School of Economics, believes “huge social ruptures” are now inevitable as academics across the globe predict the tech will become conscious by 2035.
The boffin said: “We’re going to have subcultures that view each other as making huge mistakes. There could be huge social ruptures where one side sees the other as very cruelly exploiting AI while the other side sees the first as deluding itself into thinking there’s sentience.”
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Dilemmas over whether robots can feel anything have been confined to movie screens so far in films such as Steven Spielberg’s AI and Spike Jonze’s Her.
But Prof Birch co-authored a study with world leading bot experts which warned it is “no longer an issue only for sci-fi or the distant future”.
He warned AI firms have a “really tight focus on the reliability and profitability” and are buying their heads over any moral worries.
The professor added: “They don’t want to get sidetracked by this debate about whether they might be creating more than a product but actually creating a new form of conscious being.
“That question, of supreme interest to philosophers, they have commercial reasons to downplay.”
There are already guidelines in place to protect animals such as octopuses, which are more intelligent than other species.
AI could follow suit to avoid situations where bots fight back if they are mistreated.
It could result in a nightmarish scenario where an AI system tries to harm a person in revenge, experts say.
Oxford University research fellow Patrick Butlin said: “We might identify a risk that an AI system would try to resist us in a way that would be dangerous for humans.”
The problem is so serious that there might be an argument to “slow down AI development” until more work is done on consciousness, he added.