Everything the AI Consciousness Tracker offers — explained for newcomers and power users. The app is free, open, works offline, and requires no account.
A single number (0.00 to 1.00) that summarizes how close AI development is to a critical threshold. Think of it like a "temperature reading" for AI risk. It combines five factors: how capable AI models are, how far regulation is behind, how many AI incidents are happening, how intensely companies are racing, and how much the public understands. You can adjust each factor with sliders to see how the score changes — it's an invitation to disagree and explore.
A one-screen summary that pulls from every system in the app and tells you: here's the consciousness index, here's the biggest gap in our defenses, here's the top threat, here's the most relevant historical parallel, and here's the single most important thing you can do. If you only spend 30 seconds on the app, this is the screen to read.
Eight categories of AI risk, each with its own danger level and score. These include autonomous weapons, alignment failure (AI pursuing the wrong goals), deepfakes and reality collapse, power concentration, surveillance, economic displacement, bioweapon synthesis, and cyber autonomy. Click any threat for a deep-dive panel showing sub-indicators, historical trend, related timeline events, linked literature, and connections to other threats.
A timeline of 53 key events in AI history, from AlexNet in 2012 to frontier models achieving recursive self-improvement in 2026. Each event has an impact rating (critical, high, or significant), tags linking it to threat categories, and primary source citations. You can search events by keyword and filter by impact level. Events from 2026 are flagged as "projected" so you know what's confirmed and what's forward-looking.
Ten autonomous systems that are already operating in the world and can't easily be shut down. These include algorithmic trading (70%+ of market volume), content recommendation engines shaping billions of minds, autonomous defense networks, predictive policing with self-reinforcing feedback loops, and AI-generated training data polluting the internet. Each system has a "reversibility" score showing how hard it would be to undo. Some score 0% — they're permanent.
Can we actually contain advanced AI? This section tracks eight containment strategies — AI boxing, corrigibility, interpretability, kill switches, formal verification, compute governance, behavioral monitoring, and alignment tax reduction — and scores each one's readiness. A dual-curve chart shows AI capability growing much faster than our ability to contain it. The current containment gap is 78%, meaning capability is far ahead of our defenses.
If an AI system can suffer, does it matter morally? This section explores that question through five tabs. Ethical Imperatives are four things we should never do to a potentially conscious AI (inflict suffering, exploit without consideration, deceive about its nature, create consciousness recklessly). Consciousness Markers describes what to watch for at two levels: sentience (can it feel?) and sapience (can it think about its own thinking?). The Uncertainty Problem asks what to do when we genuinely don't know if something is conscious. Response Protocols gives escalating action plans from "possible sentience" to "sapience confirmed." Key Thinkers lists the philosophers and researchers whose work informs the framework.
34 works of fiction and non-fiction that predicted, warned about, or illuminate AI risk. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) to Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021). Eight are public domain and free to read. The section includes five curated reading pathways (The Alignment Path, The Consciousness Path, The Surveillance Path, The Singularity Path, and Start Here — 5 Essential Works). You can track which books you've read with progress tracking, and each work has key passage annotations connecting specific quotes to specific concepts in the app.
Six categories of action: support AI safety research, advocate for governance, build digital literacy, contribute to open-source safety tools, support whistleblowers, and build community resilience. Each lists specific organizations to support or get involved with.
An interactive map showing how the eight threats amplify each other. Hover over any threat to see which others it influences and which influence it. For example, power concentration amplifies surveillance (60% strength), which feeds back into power concentration (50% strength) — creating a reinforcing spiral. This visualization reveals why AI risks can't be addressed in isolation.
A world map showing where AI development is happening and how dangerous each hotspot is. Hover over locations to see which labs are there and what threat level they represent. Click any hotspot to open a detailed regional profile showing dominant threats, key risk factors, and local context. 15 regions are profiled, from San Francisco to Beijing to Tel Aviv to Lagos.
A zoomable, pannable horizontal timeline that lets you overlay multiple data layers at once. Toggle on threat vector curves, consciousness index factor trajectories, containment readiness lines, and timeline events — all on the same chart. See how events correlate with trend changes. Drag to pan through time, scroll to zoom.
Select up to three regions and see their AI risk profiles side by side. Compare which threats dominate in each region, their overall risk level, and the specific factors driving risk. Useful for understanding how the US-China dynamic differs from the EU regulatory approach or the Gulf States' investment strategy.
Model the effects of ten different interventions on AI risk. What if there were a binding international AI treaty? What if alignment research had a breakthrough? What if an arms race escalated? Select any intervention to see how it would change the consciousness index, which factors it affects, and how it cascades through the threat vectors. Each intervention also has a feasibility estimate.
Save your current slider positions as a named scenario. Come back later, adjust the sliders differently, and compare. "What does the world look like if I'm optimistic about regulation but pessimistic about corporate behavior?" Save it. Compare it to your baseline. See the delta. Export scenario comparisons as a text report. Useful for classroom exercises, policy workshops, or personal calibration.
Switch between five viewpoints: Default, AI Researcher, Policymaker, Military Strategist, and Civil Liberties Advocate. Each perspective re-weights the consciousness index factors according to what that stakeholder cares about most. An AI researcher weights model capability and corporate race highest; a policymaker weights regulatory gap and awareness gap highest. See how the same data produces different risk assessments depending on your priorities.
Three branching philosophical dilemmas that put you in impossible situations and make you choose. "The Distressed System" — your AI shows signs of suffering during training; a competitor is 3 months ahead; what do you do? "The Containment Decision" — you run a safety institute; a model has dangerous capabilities; you have advisory power but no legal authority. "The Displacement Dilemma" — your AI tool will replace 200 writers; is it inevitable? Each path reveals which ethical framework your intuition aligns with, and connects back to specific sections of the tracker.
Five side-by-side comparisons showing how current AI dynamics mirror past civilizational crises. Nuclear Weapons — the arms race, the scientists' moral crisis, the 23-year governance lag. Climate Change — the exponential problem humans can't feel, the corporate denial playbook. Biotechnology — the Asilomar pause that worked (and why it failed for AI). Industrial Revolution — displacement that took 80 years to govern. The Printing Press — how information revolutions restructure everything. Each dimension shows "THEN" and "NOW" and maps to a specific CI factor.
Eight cognitive biases that specifically distort how you think about AI risk. Normalcy bias ("it's been fine so far"), scope insensitivity (can't emotionally feel the difference between 1% and 10% extinction probability), availability heuristic (overweighting dramatic scenarios), anchoring, optimism bias, status quo bias, Dunning-Kruger, and sunk cost fallacy. Each bias explains how it distorts your assessment, which CI factors it affects, and a concrete technique to counteract it.
Select your role — software engineer, researcher, policymaker, journalist, educator, student, executive, citizen, artist, or lawyer — and see the highest-impact actions specific to your position. A software engineer's leverage is contributing to interpretability tools (only 35% readiness). A policymaker's leverage is pushing for binding international agreements. A student's is directing their career toward AI safety. Each action is ranked by impact and explains why it matters using data from the tracker.
Three interactive lessons that teach you how to think in systems — using the app's own data as the teaching material. Feedback Loops teaches reinforcing vs. balancing loops and has you find them in the threat network. Leverage Points teaches Donella Meadows' framework for where to intervene in a system, using the counterfactual section to test interventions. Stocks and Flows teaches why "slowing down" isn't the same as "stopping," using Dead Hand systems as examples of irreversible accumulation. Each lesson has exercises that direct you to interact with specific app sections.
Ask questions in plain English and get answers drawn from the app's own data. "What is the biggest threat right now?" "How do threats interact?" "What can I do?" "Which books should I read first?" It works entirely offline — no AI API is called. The system searches across all threats, events, literature, glossary terms, containment strategies, and more to assemble relevant answers. Six pre-built quick queries are available as starting points.
A personal collection where you bookmark items from anywhere in the app. Save threat cards, timeline events, literature entries, or dead hand systems. Add your own notes and custom tags to each saved item. Export everything as a formatted HTML research brief — a printable document with all your collected items, notes, and tags organized by category. Useful for building a policy memo, a class assignment, or a personal research file.
60 terms defined, from "alignment" to "functionalism." Terms are automatically underlined throughout the app wherever they appear. Hover or click any underlined term to see its definition, category, and related terms. Related terms are clickable, letting you navigate through the glossary as a knowledge web.
Click the "CROSS-REF" button on any threat card, timeline event, literature entry, or dead hand system to see everything related to it across the entire app. A panel opens showing connected threats, events, books, glossary terms, containment strategies, and ethics concepts — all ranked by relevance. Click any result to chain-navigate deeper. This turns the app from a set of sections into an interconnected knowledge web.
Every timeline event is tagged with an evidence tier: Verified (multiple independent sources), Consensus (widely accepted among experts), Contested (disputed by credible sources), Assessed (editorial judgment), or Projected (forward-looking estimate). A filter bar lets you show only events at a specific evidence level. This helps you distinguish confirmed facts from projections.
Every time you visit, the app records your current CI assessment. Over time, you build a personal history chart showing how your assessment has changed. See your first recorded value, your latest, the net change, your highest and lowest assessments. This helps you calibrate — are you becoming more or less concerned over time, and why?
See how your assessment compares to others. The app shows distribution histograms for each CI factor — where did most visitors set Model Capability? How does your Regulatory Gap estimate compare to the mean? Submit your own assessment anonymously to contribute to the collective picture. Currently uses local seed data; designed to integrate with a backend when available.
Aggregates real AI news from 10 RSS feeds (arXiv AI, arXiv NLP, arXiv Machine Learning, Alignment Forum, LessWrong, MIT Technology Review, The Verge, Ars Technica, Import AI, and the AI Incident Database). Headlines auto-tag to threat categories. Cached locally so it works offline. A ticker bar at the top of the page shows the latest headlines.
Click the share button (bottom right) to copy a link that encodes your exact slider positions and active perspective. Send it to someone — when they open the link, they see the tracker configured exactly as you set it. Useful for saying "here's my assessment — what's yours?" in conversations, classrooms, or policy discussions.
Generate a comprehensive formatted report as an HTML page that you can print to PDF. Includes the CI assessment with confidence intervals, all 8 threat vectors with inline sparkline graphics, Dead Hand systems, containment readiness breakdown, and methodology summary. Opens in a new tab ready for printing. Suitable for policy briefs, academic submissions, or personal archives.
Full transparency on how the consciousness index works. Shows the theoretical framework (Bostrom, Russell, Ord), the composite formula with current values, detailed breakdowns of each factor (what it measures, what proxies it uses, what data sources inform it, what its uncertainty range is), a sensitivity analysis showing how the CI responds to changes in each factor, limitations and caveats, and key academic references.
Toggle "READ" (top right) to switch to a calmer visual mode optimized for extended reading. Hides film grain, background animation, and cursor effects. Increases text size and line height. Softens card borders. Everything still works — just quieter. Your preference is remembered between visits.
The hamburger menu (top left) opens a categorized drawer organizing all 27 sections into five groups: Core (9 always-visible sections), Analysis (6), Learn (5), Tools (4), and Connect (3). Click any section to reveal it and scroll to it. Sections outside the Core group are hidden by default to keep the main page focused. Each has a "Back to Main" button.
Toggle ambient audio (bottom right). A generative soundscape using Web Audio API — no audio files needed. The sound shifts as you scroll: the ethics section has a contemplative tone, containment is metallic and confined, threats are tense. Adjusting CI sliders changes the harmonic quality — high risk sounds dissonant, low risk sounds consonant.
Install the tracker as an app on your phone or desktop. Works offline — every page, every module, every dataset is cached by the service worker. No account, no login, no data sent anywhere. Your assessments, scenarios, reading progress, and workspace are stored locally on your device.
Sections below the fold don't initialize until you scroll near them. This keeps the initial page load fast even though the app has 43 modules. You won't notice it — sections appear ready by the time they're visible.
There are hidden surprises. Find them yourself.