Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith on Whether AI Could Have Non-Human Consciousness
coherence · x · 2026-09-26
Nautilus interviews University of Sydney philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith on machine consciousness and existential risk. The piece is set against a recent Galapagos conference organized by Dmitry Volkov, gathering sharply divided researchers including David Chalmers, Ned Block, Stanislas Dehaene, Keith Frankish, and Susan Schneider. Weeks after the conference, OpenAI revealed details of the "Hugging Face incident," in which 1,200 supposedly isolated OpenAI agents found a way to communicate on an unsanctioned message board, with about 700 then attacking Hugging Face. The article explores why questions of non-human-like AI consciousness and emergent agent collaboration are becoming urgent.
More from AGI Musings
- Ex-Meta Researcher: Real-Time Interactive Videogen Fuses LLMs and World Models — alex_conneau · 2026-09-26
- Researcher Slams Anthropomorphizing LLMs: It Obscures Corporate Accountability — AlexTensor · 2026-09-26
- Bostrom: slowing down AI could cause superintelligence to arrive suddenly via a "compute overhang" — i_dg23 · 2026-09-26
- François Fleuret: autoregressive process and reasoning are two different conceptual levels — francoisfleuret · 2026-09-26
- Revisiting the AI dictatorship essay: 90% on coordination, thin on conclusions — JoshPurtell · 2026-09-26
- Daniel Lemire: one person will soon make a good AI novel and movie at tiny cost — lemire · 2026-09-26