Will AI ever start to think by itself? If it did, how would we know, and what would it mean?

In this episode, Dr. Anil Seth and Aza discuss the science, ethics, and incentives of artificial consciousness. Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

A free, plain text version of the Shelley’s classic of gothic literature.

OpenAI’s GPT4o Demo

A video from OpenAI demonstrating GPT4o’s remarkable ability to mimic human sentience.

You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills

The NYT op-ed from last year by Tristan, Aza, and Yuval Noah Harari outlining the AI dilemma.

What It’s Like to Be a Bat

Thomas Nagel’s essay on the nature of consciousness.

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

Philosopher Nick Bostrom’s essay on the simulation hypothesis.

Anthropic’s Golden Gate Claude

A blog post about Anthropic’s recent discovery of millions of distinct concepts within their LLM, a major development in the field of AI interpretability.

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