Beyond human minds: The bewildering frontier of consciousness in insects, AI, and more

80,000 Hours Podcast

What if there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp — or a chatbot?

For centuries, humans have debated the nature of consciousness, often placing ourselves at the very top. But what about the minds of others — both the animals we share this planet with and the artificial intelligences we’re creating?

We’ve pulled together clips from past conversations with researchers and philosophers who’ve spent years trying to make sense of animal consciousness, artificial sentience, and moral consideration under deep uncertainty.

Links to learn more and full transcript: https://80k.info/nhs

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa's intro (00:00:57)
• Robert Long on what we should picture when we think about artificial sentience (00:02:49)
• Jeff Sebo on what the threshold is for AI systems meriting moral consideration (00:07:22)
• Meghan Barrett on the evolutionary argument for insect sentience (00:11:24)
• Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on whether there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp (00:15:09)
• Jonathan Birch on the cautionary tale of newborn pain (00:21:53)
• David Chalmers on why artificial consciousness is possible (00:26:12)
• Holden Karnofsky on how we’ll see digital people as... people (00:32:18)
• Jeff Sebo on grappling with our biases and ignorance when thinking about sentience (00:38:59)
• Bob Fischer on how to think about the moral weight of a chicken (00:49:37)
• Cameron Meyer Shorb on the range of suffering in wild animals (01:01:41)
• Sébastien Moro on whether fish are conscious or sentient (01:11:17)
• David Chalmers on when to start worrying about artificial consciousness (01:16:36)
• Robert Long on how we might stumble into causing AI systems enormous suffering (01:21:04)
• Jonathan Birch on how we might accidentally create artificial sentience (01:26:13)
• Anil Seth on which parts of the brain are required for consciousness (01:32:33)
• Peter Godfrey-Smith on uploads of ourselves (01:44:47)
• Jonathan Birch on treading lightly around the “edge cases” of sentience (02:00:12)
• Meghan Barrett on whether brain size and sentience are related (02:05:25)
• Lewis Bollard on how animal advocacy has changed in response to sentience studies (02:12:01)
• Bob Fischer on using proxies to determine sentience (02:22:27)
• Cameron Meyer Shorb on how we can practically study wild animals’ subjective experiences (02:26:28)
• Jeff Sebo on the problem of false positives in assessing artificial sentience (02:33:16)
• Stuart Russell on the moral rights of AIs (02:38:31)
• Buck Shlegeris on whether AI control strategies make humans the bad guys (02:41:50)
• Meghan Barrett on why she can’t be totally confident about insect sentience (02:47:12)
• Bob Fischer on what surprised him most about the findings of the Moral Weight Project (02:58:30)
• Jeff Sebo on why we’re likely to sleepwalk into causing massive amounts of suffering in AI systems (03:02:46)
• Will MacAskill on the rights of future digital beings (03:05:29)
• Carl Shulman on sharing the world with digital minds (03:19:25)
• Luisa's outro (03:33:43)

Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Milo McGuire
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore