Jacy Reese-Anthis, founder of Sentience Institute and researcher at Stanford, began his journey working for animal welfare, but is now finishing up his PhD with research in many different AI subfields at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, social science, and machine learning. While this may seem like an odd jump at first, Jacy shares how his work has all been centered around the idea of moral circle expansion. In this episode, we dig into what sentience actually means (or at least how we can begin to think about it), why anthropomorphization is more complicated than it sounds, and how language models may be able to be leveraged as an effective tool for social science research.

Jacy also shares his median AGI estimate somewhere in there, so stay tuned if you want to catch it.

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Chapters

(00:00) - Introduction
(05:41) - From Animal Welfare to Digital Minds
(09:00) - Founding Sentience Institute
(22:00) - Defining Sentience
(27:13) - The Anthropomorphization Problem
(47:51) - Why "Digital Minds" (Not "Artificial Intelligence")
(51:05) - LLMs as Social Science Tools
(01:07:03) - Jacy’s AGI Timeline & The Singularity
(01:09:23) - Final Thoughts & Outro

Critical Links
Below are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm.

Jacy's website
Wikipedia article - Jacy Reese Anthis
Sentience Institute website
CHI paper - Digital Companionship: Overlapping Uses of AI Companions and AI Assistants
ICML paper - LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method
ACL paper - The Impossibility of Fair LLMs
Wikipedia article - ELIZA effect
The Atlantic article - How a Google Employee Fell for the Eliza Effect

Thinking Through "Digital Minds" w/ Jacy Reese-Anthis