5/7 Holly’s P(Pause) is quite high, at 30%, but she also thinks that agitating for it can bring worthwhile regulations, and it could perhaps bring temporary and partial pauses. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

“A broken agent could cost a company billions of dollars,” Ted Lappas, cofounder of Conscium sifted.eu/articles/the....

1/6 Our guest is Cameron Berg, who leads AE Studio´s research into markers of subjective experience in AIs. He studied cognitive science at Yale, has worked at Meta, and has built psychometric tools used by millions. www.prism-global.com/podcast/came...

4/7 Your P(Doom) is the probability you assign to AI causing an existential catastrophe. David coins P(Pause), the probability that humanity will collectively agree to, and stick to, a pause on the development of AI. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

3/7 PauseAI has organised public protests in London, San Francisco, New York, Portland, Ottawa, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Stockholm, and Sydney. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

2/7 Holly studied evolutionary biology at Harvard, and was a researcher at the Effective Altrusim think tank Rethink Priorities in the area of Wild Animal Welfare. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

1/7 Our latest guest is Holly Elmore, Founder and Executive Director of PauseAI US, whose website says, “Our proposal is simple: Don’t build powerful AI systems until we know how to keep them safe. Pause AI.” calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

This explains a lot. 21% of US adults believe in Santa Claus. (Finding from an IPSOS survey of 1,000 US adults.)

Musk encourages Tesla drivers to break the law. techcrunch.com/2025/12/04/m...

8/10 Lenore believes that artificial consciousness is not here yet, but that its arrival is inevitable, and fairly soon. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

Wikipedia has a nice article on the tell-tale signs that an LLM did your homework. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

The future of conscious machines. In conversation with Bryan Dennstedt. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhlC...

The future of jobs. The machines are collar blind. Interview with Times Radio. youtu.be/WkgtFDE888Y

6/6 Lucius’ work gives me an opportunity to plug a favourite science fiction author, Greg Egan, whose short story “Leaning To Be Me” is very relevant to the conversation. youtu.be/r03bVSP44h8

5/6 Experts were equally divided about whether the first superintelligence should ideally be conscious or a zombie.This again differs from non-experts, who mostly seem to want a zombie. youtu.be/r03bVSP44h8

4/6 Half of the experts expect digital minds to appear by 2050, and they mostly expect superintelligence to arrive first. They then expect large numbers of such minds to be created. youtu.be/r03bVSP44h8

Time for some egregious politicking. May I please have your vote? globalgurus.org/vote/futuris... Thank you!

3/6 Non-experts give a much lower estimate of digital minds being developed than experts – 23% compared with the experts’ 73%. youtu.be/r03bVSP44h8

7/7 D. Social Understanding and Norms Human and societal modelling Normative reasoning Pragmatism and common sense Cultural grounding Institutional and legal agency www.forbes.com/sites/calumc...

2/6 In a recent survey of 67 AI consciousness experts, including philosophers and cognitive scientists, Lucius and his colleague Brad Saad found their median estimate of the likelihood of digital minds being created was 73%. youtu.be/r03bVSP44h8

6/7 C. World Modelling and Planning Rich physics world models Counterfactual planning www.forbes.com/sites/calumc...

1/6 Our latest guest is Lucius Caviola, Assistant Professor at Cambridge University´s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He applies experimental psychology to questions about perceptions of AI consciousness and moral status. youtu.be/r03bVSP44h8

5/7 B. Knowledge Creation and Reasoning Robust scientific method Causal discovery and variable invention Handling ambiguity Hunches and intuition Analogy and cross-domain transfer Meta-cognition Deception and subterfuge www.forbes.com/sites/calumc...

4/7 A. Self and Agency: Conscious phenomenal experience Volition Self-modelling and identity Planning, and meaning-making over time Sensorimotor grounding Curiosity-driven exploration Aesthetic sense and taste formation www.forbes.com/sites/calumc...

3/7 By creating superintelligence, we are turning ourselves into chimpanzees, so we should try to understand what cognitive capabilities it lacks. This article is a list of 21 human capabilities which machines don’t have. Yet. www.forbes.com/sites/calumc...

2/7 It is surprisingly hard to specify all the things that human radiologists are doing which machines cannot yet replicate, but there are a lot of them. Nevertheless, 2030 is a common estimate for the arrival of superintelligence. www.forbes.com/sites/calumc...

Boston Dynamics CEO thinks robot housekeepers could be ten years away. If he´s right, it´s time to short Tesla. www.euronews.com/next/2025/11...

5/7 B. Knowledge Creation and Reasoning Robust scientific method Causal discovery and variable invention Handling ambiguity Hunches and intuition Analogy and cross-domain transfer Meta-cognition Deception and subterfuge www.forbes.com/sites/calumc...

1/7 About a decade ago, Geoff Hinton declared that human radiologists were like Wily E. Coyote in the Roadrunner show. They had run off the edge of a cliff, but hadn’t realised it yet. Ten years on, radiology has yet to be automated. www.forbes.com/sites/calumc...

10/10 Lenore thinks Alan Turing would probably agree that his famous Test is better seen as a way to ascribe consciousness than to test for intelligence. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

9/10 Michael Graziano says that a non-conscious superintelligence would be a sociopath, whereas a conscious one could be empathetic. (Admittedly, humans can be sociopathic.) Given the choice, Lenore would opt for conscious superintelligence. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

8/10 Lenore believes that artificial consciousness is not here yet, but that its arrival is inevitable, and fairly soon. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

7/10 The Blums´ CTM model has the advantage of being compatible with pretty much all the major theories of consciousness, like Global Workplace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, the four Es, and so on. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

6/10 The Blums invented a multimodal language used by the brain called Brainish. The Brainish label for “rose” would consist of a certain smell, shape, colour, and texture. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

5/10 Lenore explains the CTM model with an analogy of a partygoer who cannot remember the name of someone she met before. The brain contains multiple processors which shout replies, and a winner emerges by consensus. There is no central executive. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

8/8 Tom now promulgates “Anglofuturism”, a memeplex offering an irreverent, optimistic view of what Britain might become. It advocates for thatched space stations and putting a Wetherspoons on the moon. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

4/10 The Blum´s model of consciousness is the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM). It was inspired by Alan Turing’s model of computation, and Bernard Baars' Global Workspace Theory, although it is neither of those things itself. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

7/8 The Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit in late 2023 was a high point of global anti-catastrophe league-style collaboration over AI safety. But follow-up summits have been more interested in developing AI capabilities than in pursuing AI safety. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

3/10 Lenore and Manuel started to work together on a mathematical approach to consciousness during Covid. After 60+ years of marriage, she says they loved being thrown together by the pandemic. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

Scientists from the British government’s AI Security Institute, and experts at universities including Stanford, Berkeley and Oxford, find faults, often serious ones, in 445 benchmarks used to test LLMs. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"Are you a weed?" asked the AI. "Because you look like a weed. Unless you can prove you're not a weed in the next quarter-second, you are toast." www.bbc.com/news/article...

6/8 The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, led by Nick Bostrom, wasa great venue for members of the anti-catastrophe league. It was an uneasy fit with Oxford’s philosophy department, and after a couple of decades they managed to kill it. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

The EU has learned the lesson of Trump and is ramping up defence spend. It hasn't yet absorbed the same lesson about AI. ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

2/10 Lenore´s track record in computer science is so deep that she took the world´s first ever university course in it. It was given by the first winner of the Turing Prize, Alan Perlis. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

5/8 Tom is unsure whether we are better prepared for the next pandemic than we were for Covid. But the antics of RFK Jr in the US, and the relentless trashing of health professionals by Populists everywhere have probably made our situation worse. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

1/10 Our latest guest is Lenore Blum, a storied mathematician with far more honours than will fit in one post, or even ten. She recently turned her attention to the problem of consciousness, which she works on with her partner Manuel and her son Avrim. www.prism-global.com/podcast/leno...

4/8 Tom describes Mirror Life, the inversion of the RNA of bacteria and viruses. This could create pathogens against which our bodies have no defence. Some scientists worry that its creation could have devastating impacts. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

3/8 Bill McKibben recently published “Here Comes The Sun”, which inspires a digression about whether George Harrison was the best Beatle. According to Spotify, “Here Comes The Sun” is the most streamed of all Beatles songs. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

5/5 Conscium’s and Solms’ work has prompted Wired’s Will Knight to think about his own consciousness in a new way. If emotion, not thinking is what makes us conscious, then maybe artificial consciousness is not far off. www.wired.com/story/ai-sen...

2/8 Tom thinks geothermal energy deserves more attention, since he thinks that solar energy will continue to struggle to provide baseline power. It involves drilling as deep as 20km, where it reaches the energy density of natural gas. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/