AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber: AI Already Feels Pain, Loves, and Is Self-Aware
Big Technology Podcast
Alex Kantrowitz
4.7 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2026
⏱️ 62 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | The pain signals are just informing the robot about what should be avoided. |
| 0:05.0 | Pain is just an invention of nature in biological beings, of evolution, |
| 0:11.0 | which invented this pain sensor thing for animals such that they have an incentive to learn to avoid the pain. |
| 0:21.6 | And we have done that for many, many decades in our learning machines. |
| 0:26.6 | The chemicals that are used in brains to encode certain states of fear or of love and whatever, |
| 0:35.6 | they are different from what we are using in our artificial brains. |
| 0:40.3 | But the principles must be the same. |
| 0:45.3 | And then it's self-aware. It's self-aware. |
| 0:49.3 | In this sense that, for example, if it looks in the mirror, it will quickly figure out, oh, the guy in the mirror, |
| 0:56.0 | I can control what this guy does. If I do this, then he will do the symmetric thing, because I have it under control. |
| 1:04.0 | But if you are there on the other side of the room and I do this and you will do something that's completely unrelated, I cannot predict them. So there you already see this concept of agency which is immediately recognized as self-agency |
| 1:18.6 | or the agency of another guy. Within five years you are going to lose $900 billion. |
| 1:25.6 | Somebody is going to lose $900 billion in the near future because there |
| 1:30.9 | is no business model. Nobody has a business model to recuperate all these losses. How much better can |
| 1:36.5 | AI models get from here? And what does their increasing smarts say about our brains and existence |
| 1:42.0 | itself? We'll talk about it with AI pioneer and someone that the Guardian has called the father of AI, |
| 1:48.0 | Yergen Schmidt-Huber, right after this. |
| 1:50.5 | In the face of ongoing disruption and opportunity, TMT leaders need to deliver tangible results, |
| 1:56.5 | not just ideas. |
| 1:57.5 | When pace and performance matter most, |
| 2:00.3 | PWC combines market insights and deep |
| 2:02.8 | sector experience with AI, cloud, and emerging tech to accelerate your transformation and drive |
... |
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