The comic Freefall had a recent strip (series of, really) that was a conversation between a starship, which asserts itself to be an unconscious intelligence, and a worker robot, which asserts itself to be conscious (and the starship describes their respective architectures such that both assertions are probably correct).

Which makes me think about robots and ships and station AIs. As I've said, I've decided I want some genuinely conscious computers, because I like the idea of machine intelligences (in fiction, anyway). But I haven't really thought about the possibility of intelligent but unconscious ones, in part because that whole idea sorta makes my brain hurt. (Yes, I've read Blindsight.)

At one point in the now-scrapped bit of fiction I was writing, it came out that Inukari and Zhdez prohibit undisclosed LLMs, but Terrans apparently don't. So I guess when you introduce yourself to someone, it's going to have to be traditional to give your name, pronouns... and species/intelligence level. Which means I need to figure out the finer points of the terminology, I guess.

Aside from the outright "because they were built that way," I have a sort of cheat to determine whether an intelligence is truly conscious, and that is because some Zhdez are cyberpaths. Pretty handy to be able to go "oh yeah, this thing has a rich interior life."