  Insofar as consciousness has a functional role in facilitating learning and
behavioral control, the builders of autonomous AI systems are likely to attempt
to incorporate it into their designs. The extensive literature on the ethics of
AI is concerned with ensuring that AI systems, and especially autonomous
conscious ones, behave ethically. In contrast, our focus here is on the rarely
discussed complementary aspect of engineering conscious AI: how to avoid
condemning such systems, for whose creation we would be solely responsible, to
unavoidable suffering brought about by phenomenal self-consciousness. We
outline two complementary approaches to this problem, one motivated by a
philosophical analysis of the phenomenal self, and the other by certain
computational concepts in reinforcement learning.
