{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"High Variance with Danny Buerkli","title":"Debatable Persons: The Coming Crisis Over AI Consciousness – with Eric Schwitzgebel","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2827,"description":"Eric Schwitzgebel — professor of philosophy at UC Riverside and author of The Weirdness of the World and the forthcoming Human-Like: A Defense of AI Rights — joins Danny Buerkli to ask what happens if we create AI systems whose consciousness we cannot determine. If they are conscious, treating them as disposable tools could amount to a horrible crime; if they are not, granting them human-like rights could have catastrophic consequences too.\nThey discuss Eric’s “design policy of the excluded middle”—the proposal that we should avoid creating systems that might or might not deserve human-like moral consideration—why useful AI architectures may make machine consciousness harder to avoid, when anthropomorphizing AI helps and when it misleads, and why an abused conscious AI might have the right to rebel. They also explore what Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice reveal about artificial personhood, why our ethics may be as unprepared for AI as medieval physics was for spaceflight, the weirdness of the world, and what Eric inherited from a father who studied under Timothy Leary and B. F. Skinner.","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/fSMAUEwHIc0CkfPeb7IjnfXz-xe_0RX3b1uajY9XKeA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85MmY1/YjYzMDAyNTExMzA5/ODdjNGNmNDBiNTNk/YWQ4MC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}