Introduction

In this episode of Reverb, Ida speaks with Robert Long about his intellectual journey from philosophy to the study of consciousness and AI. They define some of the terminology in this space, such as what we mean by consciousness, sentience, and the hard problem of consciousness. They talk about the field of AI ethics and why it’s so important, and touch on some of the theory around how we can think about sentience and ethics when it comes to AI. Robert and Ida also discuss the semi-recent case with the Google Engineer who concluded that Lamda — a large language model — was a person that deserved rights. How that happened, and what kind of implications we face as a result of these kinds of incidents.