Time To Start Panicking About AI?

In this episode, Henry and I finally do something we probably should have done in the first episode: introduce ourselves. We talk about our backgrounds in philosophy, how we became interested in psychology and cognitive science, and what drew us to thinking about AI. From there, we dig into the current state of AI capabilities, especially “agentic” AI (e.g., Claude Code), the politics of AI (including the Trump administration's recent conflict with Anthropic), and whether the growing public hostility to AI is well-founded or misdirected. We wrap up with a big question: is it time to start panicking about AI? Henry says the time to panic was five years ago. I argue that for panic or any other emotion to be productive, it must be anchored in an accurate, evidence-based understanding of what is happening, which is missing from lots of the current discourse about AI.

Links

* Dan Williams, The Mind as a Predictive Modelling Engine: Generative Models, Structural Similarity, and Mental Representation (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018).

* Dan Williams, “Socially Adaptive Belief” (2021)

* Henry Shevlin, “Three Frameworks for AI Mentality” (2026)

* Henry Shevlin, “A Lack of Understanding: Storytelling for Robots” (2019) — Litro Magazine.

* Lake et al, “Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People” (2017)

* Matt Shumer, “Something Big Is Happening” (2026)

* Leopold Aschenbrenner, Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead (2024)

* Joseph Heath, “Highbrow Climate Misinformation” (2025)

* Dean Ball

* Ethan Mollick