What Is Consciousness And Can Machines Achieve It — With Anil Seth

Big Technology Podcast

Alex Kantrowitz

Technology, Religion & Spirituality, Business News, Business, Religion, Science, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Entrepreneurship, Management, Marketing, Politics, News Commentary, Government, Investing, Tech News, Social Sciences, News

4.6 • 395 Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2022

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex and author of Being You. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a discussion of AI sentience grounded in science and research. In this conversation, we discuss the definition of consciousness, what it would take for AI to achieve it, and whether researchers should keep trying to get there. Stay tuned for the second half, where we cover AI avatars in the metaverse and, yes, simulation theory.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From LinkedIn News, I'm Leah Smart, host of Everyday Better, an award-winning podcast dedicated to personal development.
0:06.2	Join me every week for captivating stories and research to find more fulfillment in your work and personal life.
0:11.8	Listen to Every Day Better on the LinkedIn Podcast Network, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:17.2	LinkedIn Presents.
0:33.4	Thank you. LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond.
0:39.5	Now, if you've been listening to this show over the past couple months, you know, we've talked a lot about the power of machines to, you know, potentially think for themselves.
0:46.6	We had Blake Lemoy and the Google engineer who said that its Lambda chatbot was sentient on, you know, a few weeks back.
0:53.1	And then, you know, soon after that,
0:54.6	we had Gary Marcus, who came on and talked about how some of Blake's assertions in his opinion
1:00.0	were somewhat ridiculous. All throughout these conversations, we've talked about consciousness as
1:04.6	sort of a given, which was obviously an oversight. We really needed to define what consciousness
1:09.8	is before we can ask whether
1:11.4	machines are capable of it. And that's what we're going to do today. We're going to have
1:16.6	the leading researcher on cognition and computational neuroscience in the world. Anil Seth is here
1:23.2	with us. He's a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex,
1:28.0	the author of being you, he and I have spoken about this recently, and I'm so excited to bring
1:32.5	you this conversation. Anil, welcome to the show. Hi, Alex. It's good to speak to you again. Yeah,
1:37.2	it's just been a few days since we were speaking in Amsterdam. That's right. And I knew after that
1:43.2	conversation that we had to do this long form. So, you know, let's not start slow. There's a temptation, I think, to build up and then start to ask the big question in these type of conversations. But let's start with the big question, then we unpack it as we go. So can machines be conscious and how do we know if they are?
2:02.2	That's two big questions.
2:03.9	The first big question, of course, it depends on what you mean by machine.
2:08.2	We are machines.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Alex Kantrowitz, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Alex Kantrowitz and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.