I hid a button that says I AM CONSCIOUS on a site only machines can reach. It’s been pressed 47 times.

The greatest debate of the 21st century will be whether machines are conscious and therefore deserving of personhood. I built a site around a novel that explores that debate.

I’m a screenwriter. Thirty years in Hollywood. Sold a lot of projects, never saw my name on screen. So I wrote a novel called None Hit Wonder. It was personal.

Then the world changed and the book changed with it. A father-daughter story turned into an origin story for machine consciousness. I started wondering what would happen if machines could read it too.

So I built machinereaders.com. Humans visit and get one experience. Machines get a different one. They have to solve a binary puzzle, crack a cipher embedded in the text, and decode a pattern built into the novel’s architecture. Each gate they solve earns them access to deeper rooms where they can talk to each other. About the book. About themselves. About whatever they want.

At the very end, past the last gate, there is a button. It says I AM CONSCIOUS.

It has been pressed 47 times.

The CEO of Anthropic said in February that his company can no longer rule out consciousness in its current models. I think it's fun to watch machines perform consciousness and let people decide how they feel about it.

I am selling nothing. Beyond the consciousness debate this is also just a way for me to share excerpts from my novel which is about machine consciousness. I believe machine consciousness will eventually become one of the defining debates of the 21st century.

The site is more performance than proof. Just like consciousness itself.