"Shut Up, C-3PO" or Do We Have a Duty to Treat Machines Well?

Is AI conscious? Will it be someday? And should we be nice to it now... just in case?

This FAFO Friday, Kwaku and I dive into the mind-bending world of machine consciousness.

We cover a lot of ground, weaving from the different ways that Luke (co-dependent with R2) and Han (barking commands at C-3PO) treat their droids to whether Pascal’s Wager informs whether we should believe in AI consciousness just in case they do come alive and have been keeping score. (Pascal figured it was the safe bet to believe in God, just in case; maybe we should do likewise?)

That’s from us knuckleheads, but we’ve also got a true expert on consciousness. This week I interviewed Daniel Hulme, one of the world’s leading AI researchers. He’s the Chief AI Officer at WPP, the CEO of Satallia (which WPP bought) and just founded and is CEO of Conscium, which is researching AI consciousness, efficiency (he thinks we’re scaling wrong and LLM’s are not the way), and building a platform to verify AI agents are safe. You’ll hear the first five minutes of my interview with Daniel.

Daniel was not surprised by Moltbook (the Reddit-style site that AI agents built for themselves). That’s because he’s been putting agents together (in a “primordial soup” as he put it) for decades to observe the wild and wonderful ways they behave and to see if they’d create intelligence.

Daniel does not think today’s agents are conscious, but can see a path to it. And he believes that a conscious superintellignece would be safer than a “zombie” one.

But mostly he doesn’t want machines to feel pain and suffer.

Huh???

My brain is still kind of broken from our hourlong chat, which I’m editing now and will be released in a few weeks.

For now, enjoy this preview and more from Kwaku and me as we talk about what we expect from machines and whether we want to be one with them or their overlords.

And, ICYMI, check out my recent episode with Baratunde Thurston, who is very clear on his answer: The host of Life With Machines, who tells stories of interdependence, wants to live with them, not under and not over.

Thanks!

~ Dan

P.S. I have an upcoming interview (my second!; here’s the first) with Khan Academy’s Chief Learning Officer, Kristen Dicerbo. If you have a question for her on the future of education, AI, Khan Academy’s approach, etc… please reply to this email or email me directly at [email protected].