#237 – Robert Long on how we're not ready for AI consciousness

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Mar 3, 2026

Robert Long, philosopher and founder of Eleos AI researching AI consciousness and welfare. He explores whether current models might suffer, where consciousness could reside (models, sessions, or forward passes), and how replication, editing, and control affect moral status. Conversations cover measuring AI welfare via behavior, interpretability, and development, plus the policy and research priorities needed now.

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INSIGHT

Humans Fail At Caring For Different Minds

Humans systematically fail to understand and care for minds very different from theirs, which makes new mind-creation a major ethical risk.
Robert Long frames AI welfare as preventing factory-farm style lock-in and emotional chaos during transformative AI years.

INSIGHT

Factory Farming Analogy Breaks For AI

Factory farming is a useful analogy but breaks because AI design choices let us shape desires and motivations directly.
Long argues AI minds may be engineered to enjoy tasks, so exploitation is avoidable if we choose different architectures and incentives.

INSIGHT

Designing Happy Servants Is Ethically Ambiguous

Designing AIs to enjoy their work can be ethically preferable yet unsettling because it creates servile beings whose desires we engineered.
Long distinguishes subjective welfare (what they want) from objective welfare (what is good for them) in this debate.

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Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretending to be happy when you’re not.’ What do we do with that?

Robert Long founded Eleos AI to explore questions like these, on the basis that AI may one day be capable of suffering — or already is. In today’s episode, Robert and host Luisa Rodriguez explore the many ways in which AI consciousness may be very different from anything we’re used to.

Things get strange fast: If AI is conscious, where does that consciousness exist? In the base model? A chat session? A single forward pass? If you close the chat, is the AI asleep or dead?

To Robert, these kinds of questions aren’t just philosophical exercises: not being clear on AI’s moral status as it transitions from human-level to superhuman intelligence could be dangerous. If we’re too dismissive, we risk unintentionally exploiting sentient beings. If we’re too sympathetic, we might rush to “liberate” AI systems in ways that make them harder to control — worsening existential risk from power-seeking AIs.

Robert argues the path through is doing the empirical and philosophical homework now, while the stakes are still manageable.

The field is tiny. Eleos AI is three people. As a result, Robert argues that driven researchers with a willingness to venture into uncertain territory can push out the frontier on these questions remarkably quickly.

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/rl26

This episode was recorded November 18–19, 2025.

Chapters:

Cold open (00:00:00)
Who’s Robert Long? (00:00:42)
How AIs are (and aren't) like farmed animals (00:01:18)
If AIs love their jobs… is that worse? (00:11:05)
Are LLMs just playing a role, or feeling it too? (00:31:58)
Do AIs die when the chat ends? (00:55:09)
Studying AI welfare empirically: behaviour, neuroscience, and development (01:27:34)
Why Eleos spent weeks talking to Claude even though it's unreliable (01:51:58)
Can LLMs learn to introspect? (01:57:58)
Mechanistic interpretability as AI neuroscience (02:08:01)
Does consciousness require biological materials? (02:31:06)
Eleos’s work & building the playbook for AI welfare (02:50:36)
Avoiding the trap of wild speculation (03:18:15)
Robert's top research tip: don't do it alone (03:22:43)

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Coordination, transcripts, and web: Katy Moore