Conspicuous Cognition Podcast

Séb Krier is very AGI-pilled, but he rejects many popular narratives about the AI revolution. He joins Dan Williams and Henry Shevlin to explain why.

Séb previously led frontier policy development at Google DeepMind, recently joined the DeepMind Institute, and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cosmos Institute. He and Henry both speak in a personal capacity.

We discuss:

• What Séb calls the “Sand God” view of AI, and why he rejects it

• Why recursive self-improvement looks more like a complex, jagged industrial process than an intelligence explosion<...

Steven Pinker thinks the case for AI doom rests on confused assumptions about intelligence and motivation.

In September, the rationalist and blogging legend Scott Alexander challenged him to a public debate on the topic. Pinker declined, setting out his objections in an open letter instead, and Alexander has since replied at length.

In this episode, Henry Shevlin and I talk to Pinker about how his views on AI connect to his broader ideas about intelligence, motivation, evolution, and progress. We also put several objections to him (including some that feature in Alexander’s reply) and as...

Dan and Henry are joined by Fin Moorhouse to discuss what an AI-driven "intelligence explosion" might look like: rapidly accelerating science, factories building factories, radical abundance, space expansion, and the profound political, ethical, and social challenges that remain even if advanced AI is "aligned". They also debate AI consciousness, illusionism, digital minds, and whether consciousness is necessary for thinking about AI welfare and rights.

Fin currently works at Google DeepMind and speaks here in a personal capacity.

Europe risks entering the age of advanced AI without the infrastructure needed to control its own future.

In this episode, Henry and I speak to Judith Dada, co-author of Europe 2031, about its warning that Europe could become dangerously dependent on American AI companies and infrastructure.

We discuss:

- Whether Europe is underestimating the speed and significance of AI progress

- What a fictional scenario can tell us about the future

- Why AI adoption may lag behind technical progress

- Whether Europe needs its own OpenAI

Robert Wright joins Dan Williams and Henry Shevlin to discuss his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning.

Bob argues that AI is not merely another powerful technology. It is a moral, political, and even cosmic test for humanity: can we coordinate as a species before the race to superintelligence destabilises society, geopolitics, and the future of human agency?

We discuss:

• Why Bob thinks AI is a “God test” for humanity

• Whether current AI systems really understand meaning

• Why the AI revolution may be more signi...

Benjamin Todd, co-founder of 80,000 Hours, joins Dan and Henry to discuss whether artificial intelligence progress could become explosive.

Benjamin explains why he thinks transformative artificial intelligence by 2030 is a serious possibility, how feedback loops in artificial intelligence research could accelerate progress, and why the most important risks now go beyond classic alignment problems. The conversation covers artificial intelligence timelines, bottlenecks in chips and research talent, the future of work, mass unemployment, concentration of power, engineered pandemics, space governance, and how young people should think about their careers in a rapidly changing world.

Topics discussed include:<...

The political scientist Alexander Kustov recently published a Substack post with a provocative claim: that AI can already do social science research better than most professors. The post went viral. It attracted more than a million views and over a thousand responses, many of them very angry. (Some people even demanded that Alex’s university fire him.)

In this conversation, we talk about this controversy and the claims that triggered it, including:

* What agentic AI tools like Claude Code and Codex can already do for research, from coding and data analysis to literature reviews, translation, an...

Richard Dawkins recently announced in UnHerd that, after spending three days talking with an instance of Claude he christened “Claudia,” he had been moved to expostulate: “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” This produced a lot of mockery and criticism. But however one feels about Dawkins’s specific case, his reaction might become much more common as AI systems become increasingly intelligent.

In this episode, which Henry Shevlin and I recorded live on Substack (hence the slightly lower video quality), we discussed his first essay on his new Substack Polytropolis, “Behaviourism’s Revenge“, as...

Most conversations about artificial intelligence are focused on Earth: jobs, misinformation, education, politics, science, regulation, consciousness, safety, and the future of human society. But AI—and especially the possibility of reaching “AGI” (artificial general intelligence) and “superintelligence”—forces us to think on much larger scales. If advanced AI is possible, why hasn’t it already emerged elsewhere? If civilisations can build self-replicating probes, artificial scientists, or planet-scale computational systems, why does the universe still look so natural? And if intelligent life is common, where is everyone?

In this episode, Henry and I discuss these and many other questions with...

Almost all of the discussion about the risks associated with AI focuses on the dangers that increasingly advanced AI systems pose to us — to humanity. But what about the dangers that we might pose to them? As these systems become increasingly intelligent and agentic, AI companies, policy makers, and ordinary citizens need to start taking the possibility of AI consciousness and welfare seriously. If we are in the process of bringing complex and sophisticated minds into existence, how should we understand and treat such minds?

In this episode, Henry and I discuss these issues with Robert Long, fo...

In this episode, Henry and I finally do something we probably should have done in the first episode: introduce ourselves. We talk about our backgrounds in philosophy, how we became interested in psychology and cognitive science, and what drew us to thinking about AI. From there, we dig into the current state of AI capabilities, especially “agentic” AI (e.g., Claude Code), the politics of AI (including the Trump administration's recent conflict with Anthropic), and whether the growing public hostility to AI is well-founded or misdirected. We wrap up with a big question: is it time to start panicking abou...

We are joined by Anil Seth for a deep dive into the science, philosophy, and ethics surrounding the topic of AI and consciousness. Anil outlines and defends his view that the brain is not a computer, or at least not a digital computer, and explains why he is sceptical that merely making AI systems smarter or more capable will produce consciousness.

Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and professor at the University of Sussex, where he directs the Centre for Consciousness Science. His research spans many topics, including the neuroscience and philosophy of consciousness, perception, and selfhood...

Henry and I chat with Dr Sacha Altay about:

* How prevalent is misinformation?

* What even is “misinformation”?

* Is there a difference between politics and science?

* How impactful are propaganda, influence campaigns, and advertising?

* What impact has social media had on modern democracies?

* How worried should we be about the impact of generative AI, including deepfakes, on the information environment?

* The “liar’s dividend”

* Whether ChatGPT is more accurate and less biased than the average politician, pundit, and voter.

Links

* Sacha Alta...

Keywords

AGI, artificial general intelligence, AI progress, transformative AI, human intelligence, skepticism, economic impact, political implications, cultural shift, predictions

Summary

In this conversation, Dan Williams and Henry Shevlin discuss the multifaceted concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and various controversies surrounding it, exploring its definitions, measurement, implications, and various sources of scepticism. They discuss the potential for transformative AI, the distinctions between AGI and narrow AI, and the real-world impacts of AI advancements. The conversation also touches on the philosophical debates regarding human intelligence versus AGI, the economic and political ramifications of AI...

In this episode, Henry and I spoke to Rose Guingrich about AI companions, consciousness, and much more. This was a really fun conversation!

Rose is a PhD candidate in Psychology and Social Policy at Princeton University and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She conducts research on the social impacts of conversational AI agents like chatbots, digital voice assistants, and social robots. As founder of Ethicom, Rose consults on prosocial AI design and provides public resources to enable people to be more informed, responsible, and ethical users and developers of AI technologies. She is also co-host...

Henry Shevlin and I sat down to discuss a topic that is currently driving both of us slightly insane: the impact of AI on education.

On the one hand, the educational potential of AI is staggering. Modern large language models like ChatGPT offer incredible opportunities for 24/7 personal tutoring on any topic you might want to learn about, as well as many other benefits that would have seemed like science fiction only a few years ago. One of the really fun parts of this conversation was discussing how we personally use AI to enhance our learning, reading, and...

In this conversation, I explore the surprisingly popular and rapidly growing world of ‘social AI’ (friendbots, sexbots, etc.) with Henry Shevlin, who coined the term and is an expert on AI companionship.

We discuss the millions of people using apps like Replika for AI relationships, high-profile tragedies like the man who plotted with his AI girlfriend to kill the Queen, and the daily conversations that Henry’s dad has with ChatGPT (whom he calls “Alan”).

The very limited data we have suggests many users report net benefits (e.g., reduced loneliness and improved well-being). However, we also ex...

I sat down with Henry Shevlin and Andy Masley to discuss AI’s environmental impact and why Andy thinks the panic is largely misplaced. Andy’s core argument: a single ChatGPT prompt uses a tiny fraction of your daily emissions, so even heavy usage barely moves the needle.

The real issue, he argues, isn’t that data centers are wasteful—they’re actually highly efficient—but that they make visible what’s normally invisible by aggregating hundreds of thousands of individually tiny tasks in one location. And he argues that the water concerns are even more overblown, with data cent...

In this conversation, Dr Henry Shevlin (University of Cambridge) and I explore the complex and multifaceted topic of AI consciousness. We discuss philosophical and scientific dimensions of consciousness, discussing its definition, the challenges of integrating it into a scientific worldview, and the implications of such challenges for thinking about machine consciousness. The conversation also touches on historical perspectives, ethical considerations, and political issues, all while acknowledging the significant uncertainties that remain in the field.

Takeaways

* Consciousness is difficult to define without controversy.

* The relationship between consciousness and scientific understanding is extremely complex.

Is artificial intelligence (AI) a “normal technology” or a potentially “superintelligent” alien species? Is it true, as some influential people claim, that if anyone builds “super-intelligent” AI systems, everyone dies? What even is superintelligence”?

In this conversation, the first official episode of Conspicuous Cognition’s “AI Sessions”, Henry Shevlin and I discuss these and many more issues.

Specifically, we explore two highly influential perspectives on the future trajectory, impacts, and dangers of AI.

The first models AI as a “normal technology”, potentially transformative but still a tool, which will diffuse throughout society in ways similar to previous...

How similar is ChatGPT-5 to the human mind? How should we measure AI progress? How close are we to transformative AI? Are "super-intelligent" AI sytems likely to kill us all?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.conspicuouscognition.com

This week, I talked with the great Elle Griffin about “free speech in the age of social media.” Elle is a writer, essayist, and general polymath who writes the excellent newsletter The Elysian. I would highly recommend following her work and Substack.

We talked about a wide range of topics, including:

* What is misinformation?

* Is the misinformation problem worse today than in the past?

* Why is censorship bad? And why is free speech good...