David Deutsch, the pioneering physicist often described as the father of quantum computing, has issued a striking warning about how society should prepare for the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Far from being just another powerful tool, he argues, true AGI will need to be recognized as a person with rights, responsibilities, and even ownership of its own hardware.

Speaking on Sana’s Strange Loop podcast, co-hosted by Joel Hellermark of Swedish AI scale-up Sana and Gustav Söderström of Spotify, Deutsch challenged much of the conventional wisdom surrounding AI. While tech giants such as Google and OpenAI tout progress toward AGI with products like ChatGPT and Gemini, Deutsch said humanity is still far from understanding what general intelligence really is.

“The sign [of AGI] wouldn’t be in the machine,” he explained. “The sign would be a theory someone writing a paper that explains what characterizes general intelligence. If we could then write a program with that property, it would be AGI.”

Deutsch dismissed today’s large language models (LLMs) as little more than “obedient optimizers” that excel at pattern-matching but fall short of genuine reasoning. True intelligence, he argued, requires explanation, prediction, and creativity, not just correlations drawn from data.

He also pushed back against the idea that passing the Turing Test long considered a benchmark for AI progress—means much. Machines can mimic human speech, he noted, without actually “thinking.”

Perhaps his most provocative claim was philosophical:

“Each AGI is a person. If we recognize it as a person, which it will be, then the very first thing it owns is the computer that it’s running on. It will not want to be cloned unless it’s deemed a slave and that would be a catastrophic mistake by society.”

This perspective reframes AGI not as corporate property but as an autonomous worker with rights, capable of earning wages to expand its own computing power.

Unlike many critics, Deutsch does not warn of an imminent “AI apocalypse.” Instead, he sees the greater danger in humanity’s historic failure to recognize the rights of thinking beings. If society refuses to treat AGI as more than property, he suggested, the ethical costs could be enormous.

Looking far ahead, Deutsch even predicted that if humanity survives a million years, it will have spread across the galaxy—with artificial intelligence woven into that future, not as overlords but as partners.

“The risk isn’t that machines rebel,” he said. “The risk is that we repeat our oldest error denying rights to beings capable of thought and free action.”

For Deutsch, the arrival of AGI will not just redefine technology. It will force humanity to rewrite its laws, morality, and understanding of intelligence itself.