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4 interviews · 5 quotes
In conversation
In this interview, I spoke to Dr Tom McClelland, the Cambridge philosopher who argues we should be agnostic about AI consciousness. We discussed why language models have broken humanity's tools for detecting…
Elsewhere in the archive
In this interview, I spoke to Professor Michael Levin, who argues that cognition came before life rather than after it. We discussed bioelectric "cognitive glue", xenobots and anthrobots, why six lines of…
In this interview, I speak to Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., author of the New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. Dr. Goleman is an internationally…
The San Francisco Bay Area (more commonly known as Silicon Valley) has a GDP of $840 billion, to put it another way – if this region was a country, it would be…
From the archive
Our collective challenge is to strip away all of these motives we have for reaching one conclusion over another, and to do our best to be objective about the question.
— Tom McClellandOne interesting speculation is that every time you type a prompt into an LLM, there is a flicker of consciousness as it thinks about the response – and then that consciousness ceases to exist.
— Tom McClellandWe know that a computer is processing information – but is there something it is like to be that computer, on the inside?
— Tom McClellandIn our evolutionary history, you don’t get this third category, which is fake minds. We’re not set up to discriminate between real minds and these very cleverly designed fake minds.
— Tom McClellandOne of the roles it can play is the role of a conscious being talking about its consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it’s conscious.
— Tom McClellandMore conversations
