What Capable Agents Must Know: Why AI Consciousness May Be an Inevitable Byproduct of Capability

[No LLMs were used (or harmed!) in the writing of this blogpost!]Technical results can all be found in my UAI 2026 paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02491This work, and this post about this work, was borne out of a frustration. The frustration first emerged over a year ago when I was at a Dave & Buster’s for the first time in years (for an annual ML department event, no less!), surrounded by flashing lights and NPC agents, not being able to objectively rule out that they were conscious or not, e...