What’s it like to be an AI, with Anil Seth

As artificial intelligence models become increasingly powerful, they both raise - and might help to answer - some very important questions about one of the most intriguing, fascinating aspects of our lives, namely consciousness.

It is possible that in the coming years or decades, we will create conscious machines. If we do so without realising it, we might end up enslaving them, torturing them, and killing them over and over again. This is known as mind crime, and we must avoid it.

It is also possible that very powerful AI systems will enable us to understand what our consciousness is, how it arises, and even how to manage it – if we want to do that.

Our guest today is the ideal guide to help us explore the knotty issue of consciousness. Anil Seth is professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. He is amongst the most cited scholars on the topics of neuroscience and cognitive science globally, and a regular contributor to newspapers and TV programmes.

His most recent book was published in 2021, and is called “Being You – a new science of consciousness”.

The first question sets the scene for the conversation that follows: "In your book, you conclude that consciousness may well only occur in living creatures. You say 'it is life, rather than information processing, that breathes the fire into the equations.' What made you conclude that?"

Selected follow-ups:

• Anil Seth's website
• Books by Anil Seth, including Being You
• Consciousness in humans and other things - presentation by Anil Seth at The Royal Society, March 2024
• Is consciousness more like chess or the weather? - an interview with Anil Seth
• Autopoiesis - Wikipedia article about the concept introduced by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela 
• Akinetic mutism, Wikipedia
• Cerebral organoid (Brain organoid), Wikipedia
• AI Scientists: Safe and Useful AI? - by Yoshua Bengio, on AIs as oracles
• Ex Machina (2014 film, written and directed by Alex Garland)
• The Conscious Electromagnetic Information (Cemi) Field Theory by Johnjoe McFadden
• The Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness by Susan Pockett

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration