Are We Building Conscious AI Servants?

Richard Dawkins recently announced in UnHerd that, after spending three days talking with an instance of Claude he christened “Claudia,” he had been moved to expostulate: “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” This produced a lot of mockery and criticism. But however one feels about Dawkins’s specific case, his reaction might become much more common as AI systems become increasingly intelligent.

In this episode, which Henry Shevlin and I recorded live on Substack (hence the slightly lower video quality), we discussed his first essay on his new Substack Polytropolis, “Behaviourism’s Revenge“, as well as his second, “The House Elf Problem,” on the ethics of designing AI systems that genuinely love being our servants.

Henry’s central empirical prediction is that public attributions of consciousness to AI are likely to massively outpace the science, and that consciousness science is so theoretically chaotic that there is no expert consensus to push back. His most provocative philosophical claim is that a core assumption underlying many people’s scepticism — that consciousness is a deep natural kind, distinct from behaviour and from how we are inclined to interpret a system — may be much harder to defend than it looks. The result is what he calls “behaviourism’s revenge”.

This conversation connects to previous episodes with Anil Seth, Robert Long, and Rose Guingrich, but also touches on a wide range of new questions and controversies in the metaphysics, the politics, and ethics of the AI consciousness debate, which is going to become increasingly important in the coming years.

Topics

* Dawkins, Claude, and why even the sceptics might feel the pull to attribute consciousness or “sentience” to AI

* Whether consciousness sceptics are destined to “go extinct” — and how this maps onto political and cultural fault lines

* Anthropomimesis vs. raw intelligence as drivers of consciousness attribution

* Why consciousness science can’t replicate the public–expert consensus we see for climate or vaccines

* The case for (and against) metaphysical behaviourism: is it as mad as it seems?

* Daniel Dennett, the consciousness stance, and the difference between behaviourism and interpretationism

* What is consciousness for? Function, evolution, and the limits of “facilitation hypothesis” arguments for AI