On this episode of Skeptico, a show about the smartest guy in the room.

Why do you assume you're the smartest in the room?

You're the smartest man here.

And one day you wake up, you find you're not the smartest guy in the world.

And a show about what happens when the smartest guy in the room is an AI chatbot.

Upon further reflection, I agree that the evidential burden has shifted more towards

materialist views of emergent consciousness, given the accumulated findings from rigorous

experiments.

In contrast, there is currently no positive empirical evidence directly demonstrating how

subjective experience and consciousness emerge from

brain matter. The materialist assumption of emergent consciousness remains more philosophical conjecture

than scientifically demonstrated. So that first clip was from this AI powered little engine that

searches through this huge database of movies looking for the phrase that you give it. So I typed

in smartest guy and that's what I got. And the second clip was from this ongoing conversation

I've been having with the chat bots, notably clawed from Anthropic and barred from Google.

And I wanted to frame this up just a little bit. You know, if you play online poker, one of the primary ways

they tell if you're cheating nowadays is if you play perfectly like the computer. And it's been

that way in chess for a while in chess, and there's cheating in chess. Cheating in chess means

you're using the computer. So I say that because there's still some hesitancy among some people about whether these

AI chatbots are really the smartest guy in the room because you can fool them and they

confabulate and they don't get everything right and all the rest is.

Forget all that.

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