Anil Seth's TED talk says AI won't become conscious; Domingos pushes back with AlphaFold
pmddomingos · x · 2026-09-30
Neuroscientist Anil Seth's 2026 TED talk, "Why AI isn't going to become conscious," is now online with 520k+ plays. His core argument: we project consciousness onto AI the way we see faces in clouds — brilliant mimics, not sentient beings.
- Seth's verdict: AI is unlikely to ever gain consciousness
- Pedro Domingos responded: "AlphaFold and Claude are very similar, but we don't worry that AlphaFold will become conscious… the fact that we worry about it for Claude says more about us than about it."
The exchange crystallizes a classic split in the AI consciousness debate: whether sentience requires a biological substrate, or whether we simply anthropomorphize talking machines more than protein predictors.
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