In this episode we return to the subject of whether AIs will become conscious, or, to use a word from the title of the latest book from our guest today, whether AIs will become sentient.

Our guest is Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at London School of Economics, and Bye Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. His latest book is “Sentience: the invention of consciousness”, and it explores the emergence and role of consciousness from a variety of perspectives.

The book draws together insights from the more than fifty years Nick has been studying the evolution of intelligence and consciousness. He was the first person to demonstrate the existence of “blindsight” after brain damage in monkeys, studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, originated the theory of the “social function of intellect”, and has investigated the evolutionary background of religion, art, healing, death-awareness, and suicide. Among his other awards are the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the Pufendorf Medal, and the International Mind and Brain Prize.

The conversation starts with some reflections on the differences between the views of our guest and his long-time philosophical friend Daniel Dennett, who had died shortly before the recording took place.

Selected follow-ups:

• The website of Nicholas Humphrey
• The book Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness
• How did consciousness evolve? - Recording of talk to the Royal Institution
• The book Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
• Penrose triangle (article contains "real impossible triangles")
• Keith Frankish (philosopher of mind)
• The psychonic theory of consciousness - a theory included in the 1929 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Lawrence (Larry) Weiskrantz - the supervisor of Nicholas Humphrey
• Blindside patient 'TN'
• The Tin Men by Michael Frayn
• What’s it like to be an AI: Anil Seth on London Futurists Podcast
• Joe Simpson (mountaineer)
• The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness
• Scientific Declaration on Insect Sentience and Welfare
• Rupert Sheldrake
• Alternative Natural Philosophy Association (ANPA)

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Our topic in this episode is progress with ending aging. Our guest is the person who literally wrote the book on that subject, namely the book, “Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime”. He is Aubrey de Grey, who describes himself in his Twitter biography as “spearheading the global crusade to defeat aging”.

In pursuit of that objective, Aubrey co-founded the Methuselah Foundation in 2003, the SENS Research Foundation in 2009, and the LEV Foundation, that is the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, in 2022, where he serves as President and Chief Science Officer.

Full disclosure: David also has a role on the executive management team of LEV Foundation, but for this recording he was wearing his hat as co-host of the London Futurists Podcast.

The conversation opens with this question: "When people are asked about ending aging, they often say the idea sounds nice, but they see no evidence for any actual progress toward ending aging in humans. They say that they’ve heard talk about that subject for years, or even decades, but wonder when all that talk is going to result in people actually living significantly longer. How do you respond?"

Selected follow-ups:

• Aubrey de Grey on X (Twitter)
• The book Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime
• The Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation
• The SENS paradigm for ending aging , contrasted with the "Hallmarks of Aging" - a 2023 article in Rejuvenation Research
• Progress reports from the current RMR project
• The plan for RMR 2
• The RAID (Rodent Aging Interventions Database) analysis that guided the design of RMR 1 and 2
• Longevity Summit Dublin (LSD): 13-16 June 2024
• Unblocking the Brain’s Drains to Fight Alzheimer’s - Doug Ethell of Leucadia Therapeutics at LSD 2023 (explains the possible role of the cribriform plate)
• Targeting Telomeres to Clear Cancer – Vlad Vitoc of MAIA Biotechnology at LSD 2023
• How to Run a Lifespan Study of 1,000 Mice - Danique Wortel of Ichor Life Sciences at LSD 2023
• XPrize Healthspan
• The Dublin Longevity Declaration ("DLD")

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

As artificial intelligence models become increasingly powerful, they both raise - and might help to answer - some very important questions about one of the most intriguing, fascinating aspects of our lives, namely consciousness.

It is possible that in the coming years or decades, we will create conscious machines. If we do so without realising it, we might end up enslaving them, torturing them, and killing them over and over again. This is known as mind crime, and we must avoid it.

It is also possible that very powerful AI systems will enable us to understand what our consciousness is, how it arises, and even how to manage it – if we want to do that.

Our guest today is the ideal guide to help us explore the knotty issue of consciousness. Anil Seth is professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. He is amongst the most cited scholars on the topics of neuroscience and cognitive science globally, and a regular contributor to newspapers and TV programmes.

His most recent book was published in 2021, and is called “Being You – a new science of consciousness”.

The first question sets the scene for the conversation that follows: "In your book, you conclude that consciousness may well only occur in living creatures. You say 'it is life, rather than information processing, that breathes the fire into the equations.' What made you conclude that?"

Selected follow-ups:

• Anil Seth's website
• Books by Anil Seth, including Being You
• Consciousness in humans and other things - presentation by Anil Seth at The Royal Society, March 2024
• Is consciousness more like chess or the weather? - an interview with Anil Seth
• Autopoiesis - Wikipedia article about the concept introduced by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
• Akinetic mutism, Wikipedia
• Cerebral organoid (Brain organoid), Wikipedia
• AI Scientists: Safe and Useful AI? - by Yoshua Bengio, on AIs as oracles
• Ex Machina (2014 film, written and directed by Alex Garland)
• The Conscious Electromagnetic Information (Cemi) Field Theory by Johnjoe McFadden
• The Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness by Susan Pockett

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Our guest in this episode is Adam Kovacevich. Adam is the Founder and CEO of the Chamber of Progress, which describes itself as a center-left tech industry policy coalition that works to ensure that all citizens benefit from technological leaps, and that the tech industry operates responsibly and fairly.

Adam has had a front row seat for more than 20 years in the tech industry’s political maturation, and he advises companies on navigating the challenges of political regulation.

For example, Adam spent 12 years at Google, where he led a 15-person policy strategy and external affairs team. In that role, he drove the company’s U.S. public policy campaigns on topics such as privacy, security, antitrust, intellectual property, and taxation.

We had two reasons to want to talk with Adam. First, to understand the kerfuffle that has arisen from the lawsuit launched against Apple by the U.S. Department of Justice and sixteen state Attorney Generals. And second, to look ahead to possible future interactions between tech industry regulators and the industry itself, especially as concerns about Artificial Intelligence rise in the public mind.

Selected follow-ups:

• Adam Kovacevich's website
• The Chamber of Progress
• Gartner Hype Cycle
• "Justice Department Sues Apple for Monopolizing Smartphone Markets"
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
• Epic Games v. Apple (Wikipedia)
• "AirTags Are the Best Thing to Happen to Tile" (Wired)
• Adobe Firefly
• The EU AI Act

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

In this episode, we are delving into the fascinating topic of mind uploading. We suspect this idea is about to explode into public consciousness, because Nick Bostrom has a new book out shortly called “Deep Utopia”, which addresses what happens if superintelligence arrives and everything goes well. It was Bostrom’s last book, “Superintelligence”, that ignited the great robot freak-out of 2015.

Our guest is Dr Kenneth Hayworth, a Senior Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. Janelia is probably America’s leading research institution in the field of connectomics – the precise mapping of the neurons in the human brain.

Kenneth is a co-inventor of a process for imaging neural circuits at the nanometre scale, and he has designed and built several automated machines to do it. He is currently researching ways to extend Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy imaging of brain tissue to encompass much larger volumes than are currently possible.

Along with John Smart, Kenneth co-founded the Brain Preservation Foundation in 2010, a non-profit organization with the goal of promoting research in the field of whole brain preservation.

During the conversation, Kenneth made a strong case for putting more focus on preserving human brains via a process known as aldehyde fixation, as a way of enabling people to be uploaded in due course into new bodies. He also issued a call for action by members of the global cryonics community.

Selected follow-ups:

• Kenneth Hayworth
• The Brain Preservation Foundation
• An essay by Kenneth Hayworth: Killed by Bad Philosophy
• The short story Psychological Counseling for First-time Teletransport Users (PDF)
• 21st Century Medicine
• Janelia Research Campus

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Our guest in this episode is Lou de K, Program Director at the Foresight Institute.

David recently saw Lou give a marvellous talk at the TransVision conference in Utrecht in the Netherlands, on the subject of “AGI Alignment: Challenges and Hope”. Lou kindly agreed to join us to review some of the ideas in that talk and to explore their consequences.

Selected follow-ups:

• Personal website of Lou de K (Lou de Kerhuelvez)
• Foresight.org
• TransVision Utrecht 2024
• The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence by Tim Urban on Wait But Why
• AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey - 98 page PDF with authors from Peking University and other universities
• Synthetic Sentience: Can Artificial Intelligence become conscious? - Talk by Joscha Bach at CCC, December 2023
• Pope Francis "warns of risks of AI for peace" (Vatican News)
• Claude's Constitution by Anthropic
• Roman Yampolskiy discusses multi-multi alignment (Future of Life podcast)
• Shoggoth with Smiley Face on Know Your Meme
• Shoggoth on AISafetyMemes on X/Twitter
• Orthogonality Thesis on LessWrong
• Quotes by the poet Lucille Clifton
• Decentralized science (DeSci) on Ethereum.org
• Listing of Foresight Institute fellows
• The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan
• The Network State vs. Coordi-Nations featuring the ideas of Primavera De Filippi
• DeSci London event, Imperial College Business School, 23-24 March

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Calum and David recently attended the BGI24 event in Panama City, that is, the Beneficial General Intelligence summit and unconference. One of the speakers we particularly enjoyed listening to was Daniel Faggella, the Founder and Head of Research of Emerj.

Something that featured in his talk was a 3 by 3 matrix, which he calls the Intelligence Trajectory Political Matrix, or ITPM for short. As we’ll be discussing in this episode, one of the dimensions of this matrix is the kind of end goal future that people desire, as intelligent systems become ever more powerful. And the other dimension is the kind of methods people want to use to bring about that desired future.

So, if anyone thinks there are only two options in play regarding the future of AI, for example “accelerationists” versus “doomers”, to use two names that are often thrown around these days, they’re actually missing a much wider set of options. And frankly, given the challenges posed by the fast development of AI systems that seem to be increasingly beyond our understanding and beyond our control, the more options we can consider, the better.

The topics that featured in this conversation included:

• "The Political Singularity" - when the general public realize that one political question has become more important than all the others, namely should humanity be creating an AI with godlike powers, and if so, under what conditions
• Criteria to judge whether a forthcoming superintelligent AI is a "worthy successor" to humanity.

Selected follow-ups:

• The website of Dan Faggella
• The BGI24 conference, lead organiser Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET
• The Intelligence Trajectory Political Matrix
• The Political Singularity
• A Worthy Successor - the purpose of AGI
• Roko Mijic on Twitter/X
• The novel Diaspora by Greg Egan

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

In the wide and complex subject of biological aging, one particular kind of biological aging has been receiving a great deal of attention in recent years. That’s the field of epigenetic aging, where parts of the packaging or covering, as we might call it, of the DNA in all of our cells, alters over time, changing which genes are turned on and turned off, with increasingly damaging consequences.

What’s made this field take off is the discovery that this epigenetic aging can be reversed, via an increasing number of techniques. Moreover, there is some evidence that this reversal gives a new lease of life to the organism.

To discuss this topic and the opportunities arising, our guest in this episode is Daniel Ives, the CEO of Shift Bioscience. As you’ll hear, Shift Bioscience is a company that is carrying out some very promising research into this field of epigenetic aging.

Daniel has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and co-founded Shift Bioscience in 2017.

The conversation highlighted a way of using AI transformer models and a graph neural network to dramatically speed up the exploration of which proteins can play the best role in reversing epigenetic aging. It also considered which other types of aging will likely need different sorts of treatments, beyond these proteins. Finally, conversation turned to a potential fast transformation of public attitudes toward the possibility and desirability of comprehensively treating aging - a transformation called "all hell breaks loose" by Daniel, and "the Longevity Singularity" by Calum.

Selected follow-ups:
Shift Bioscience
Aubrey de Grey's TED talk "A roadmap to end aging"
Epigenetic clocks (Wikipedia)
Shinya Yamanaka (Wikipedia)
scGPT - bioRxiv preprint by Bo Wang and colleagues

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration