Beyond human minds: The bewildering frontier of consciousness in insects, AI, and more

Beyond human minds: The bewildering frontier of consciousness in insects, AI, and more

What if there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp — or a chatbot?

For centuries, humans have debated the nature of consciousness, often placing ourselves at the very top. But what about the minds of others — both the animals we share this planet with and the artificial intelligences we’re creating?

We’ve pulled together clips from past conversations with researchers and philosophers who’ve spent years trying to make sense of animal consciousness, artificial sentience, and moral consideration under deep uncertainty.

Links to learn more and full transcript: https://80k.info/nhs

Chapters:

  • Cold open (00:00:00)
  • Luisa's intro (00:00:57)
  • Robert Long on what we should picture when we think about artificial sentience (00:02:49)
  • Jeff Sebo on what the threshold is for AI systems meriting moral consideration (00:07:22)
  • Meghan Barrett on the evolutionary argument for insect sentience (00:11:24)
  • Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on whether there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp (00:15:09)
  • Jonathan Birch on the cautionary tale of newborn pain (00:21:53)
  • David Chalmers on why artificial consciousness is possible (00:26:12)
  • Holden Karnofsky on how we’ll see digital people as... people (00:32:18)
  • Jeff Sebo on grappling with our biases and ignorance when thinking about sentience (00:38:59)
  • Bob Fischer on how to think about the moral weight of a chicken (00:49:37)
  • Cameron Meyer Shorb on the range of suffering in wild animals (01:01:41)
  • Sébastien Moro on whether fish are conscious or sentient (01:11:17)
  • David Chalmers on when to start worrying about artificial consciousness (01:16:36)
  • Robert Long on how we might stumble into causing AI systems enormous suffering (01:21:04)
  • Jonathan Birch on how we might accidentally create artificial sentience (01:26:13)
  • Anil Seth on which parts of the brain are required for consciousness (01:32:33)
  • Peter Godfrey-Smith on uploads of ourselves (01:44:47)
  • Jonathan Birch on treading lightly around the “edge cases” of sentience (02:00:12)
  • Meghan Barrett on whether brain size and sentience are related (02:05:25)
  • Lewis Bollard on how animal advocacy has changed in response to sentience studies (02:12:01)
  • Bob Fischer on using proxies to determine sentience (02:22:27)
  • Cameron Meyer Shorb on how we can practically study wild animals’ subjective experiences (02:26:28)
  • Jeff Sebo on the problem of false positives in assessing artificial sentience (02:33:16)
  • Stuart Russell on the moral rights of AIs (02:38:31)
  • Buck Shlegeris on whether AI control strategies make humans the bad guys (02:41:50)
  • Meghan Barrett on why she can’t be totally confident about insect sentience (02:47:12)
  • Bob Fischer on what surprised him most about the findings of the Moral Weight Project (02:58:30)
  • Jeff Sebo on why we’re likely to sleepwalk into causing massive amounts of suffering in AI systems (03:02:46)
  • Will MacAskill on the rights of future digital beings (03:05:29)
  • Carl Shulman on sharing the world with digital minds (03:19:25)
  • Luisa's outro (03:33:43)

Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Milo McGuire
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

Jaksot(323)

Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)

Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)

The arrival of AGI could “compress a century of progress in a decade,” forcing humanity to make decisions with higher stakes than we’ve ever seen before — and with less time to get them right. But AI ...

6 Maalis 31min

We're Not Ready for AI Consciousness | Robert Long, philosopher and founder of Eleos AI

We're Not Ready for AI Consciousness | Robert Long, philosopher and founder of Eleos AI

Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretending to be happy when you’re not.’ What do we do with...

3 Maalis 3h 25min

#236 – Max Harms on why teaching AI right from wrong could get everyone killed

#236 – Max Harms on why teaching AI right from wrong could get everyone killed

Most people in AI are trying to give AIs ‘good’ values. Max Harms wants us to give them no values at all. According to Max, the only safe design is an AGI that defers entirely to its human operators, ...

24 Helmi 2h 41min

#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’

#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’

Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to make AI safe and beneficial. It sounds circular, almos...

17 Helmi 2h 54min

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?

In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then, in the second half of ...

10 Helmi 25min

#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young p...

3 Helmi 2h 51min

#234 – David Duvenaud on why 'aligned AI' would still kill democracy

#234 – David Duvenaud on why 'aligned AI' would still kill democracy

Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do inevitably leads to the “gradual disempowerment” of ...

27 Tammi 2h 31min

#145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable

#145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable

In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, et...

20 Tammi 2h 56min

Suosittua kategoriassa Koulutus

rss-murhan-anatomia
voi-hyvin-meditaatiot-2
rss-narsisti
rss-uskonto-on-tylsaa
rss-liian-kuuma-peruna
rss-vapaudu-voimaasi
psykopodiaa-podcast
psykologia
adhd-podi
rss-valo-minussa-2
aamukahvilla
kesken
rss-duodecim-lehti
rahapuhetta
rss-tietoinen-yhteys-podcast-2
rss-hereilla
dear-ladies
filocast-filosofian-perusteet
ihminen-tavattavissa-tommy-hellsten-instituutti
rss-taloustaito-podcast