Dr. Michael Timothy Bennett is an award-winning AI researcher at the Australian National University and author of "How to Build Conscious Machines" — a mathematical blueprint for why anything is conscious and what it would take to engineer a machine that truly experiences the world.
Expect to learn why information processing feels like anything at all, how consciousness is built from a hierarchy of selves, why a fly has experience but a slime mold does not, why current AI is fundamentally incapable of consciousness, how cancer is an alignment problem between cells, what building a conscious machine actually requires, and much more
…Timestamps:
00:00 Why Does Information Processing Feel Like Anything?
01:05 The Cosmic Ord: How the Universe Deletes What Doesn't Work
03:59 Where is the Line Between Non-Conscious and Conscious?
05:53 Multi-Scale Competency: Cells, Organs, Organisms, Ecosystems
07:43 The First Order Self: Phenomenal Consciousness Explained
08:27 Access Consciousness: Predicting Your Prediction of Me
13:04 When Do Enough Abstraction Layers Produce Experience?
18:40 Liquid Brains vs Solid Brains: Ant Colonies and Human Networks
21:03 Bioelectricity: How Cells Signal and Cooperate
24:03 Human-AI Hybrids: Prosthetic, Cooperative and Integrated
30:30 Is There a Bottom to the Abstraction Stack?
37:07 Why a Single Thread CPU Will Never Feel Anything
40:56 Feeling Pain vs Knowing You Feel Pain
42:52 Do Dogs Model Your Mind?
46:58 The Paper He Wrote as a Joke That Won Best Student Prize
48:11 Cancer as a Breakdown in Cellular Cooperation
53:22 Why Elephants Don't Get Cancer and What That Means for AI
56:47 How Do You Actually Build a Conscious Machine?
01:01:36 Does a Tesla Robot Have Grounding?
01:04:17 Should We Build Conscious Machines?
01:06:46 If You Design a Robot to Love Cleaning Your Toilet
01:08:25 His Biggest Fears About the Future of AI
01:13:09 The Rise of Anti-Natalism and Losing Hope
01:14:34 The Library of Babel: Why Modern Life Feels Overwhelming
...
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