Can AIs be conscious? Now that we have a better understanding of the mind, we might have some answers to that question.

That's coming up with best-selling author Michael Pollan right after this.

Michael Lewis here. My best-selling book The Big Short tells the story of the build-up and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008.

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and who really pays for an unchecked financial system,

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Welcome to Big Technology Podcast,

a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation

of the tech world and beyond.

Today, we have a great show for you. We are going

to drill into the depths of artificial intelligence's ability to achieve consciousness and we're

going to do it with the perfect person. We have Michael Pollan here. He is the author of the book,

A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness that is out this week from Penguin Press. Michael, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, good to see you, Alex. So let's just start with consciousness. The first thing that I really felt while reading your book, because you describe consciousness in many different ways,

is just that consciousness is kind of amazing and we're going to get into whether AIs can achieve it, but just strictly

on the human side of things to start. I mean, it is amazing in some ways that, yes, we're here,

but we have this awareness of ourselves in the universe that's just kind of mind-blowing the fact

that it exists. Wouldn't you agree? Yeah, you know, it's funny. We don't think about it very often. We go through life thinking

...