#100 Meet The Scientist Who Wrote the Blueprint for Conscious Machines

Dr. Michael Timothy Bennett is an award-winning AI researcher at
the Australian National University and author of "How to Build
Conscious Machines" — a mathematical blueprint for why anything
is conscious and what it would take to engineer a machine that
truly experiences the world.


Expect to learn why information processing feels like anything at
all, how consciousness is built from a hierarchy of selves, why a
fly has experience but a slime mold does not, why current AI is
fundamentally incapable of consciousness, how cancer is an
alignment problem between cells, what building a conscious
machine actually requires, and much more


…Timestamps:


00:00 Why Does Information Processing Feel Like Anything?


01:05 The Cosmic Ord: How the Universe Deletes What Doesn't Work


03:59 Where is the Line Between Non-Conscious and Conscious?


05:53 Multi-Scale Competency: Cells, Organs, Organisms,
Ecosystems


07:43 The First Order Self: Phenomenal Consciousness Explained


08:27 Access Consciousness: Predicting Your Prediction of Me


13:04 When Do Enough Abstraction Layers Produce Experience?


18:40 Liquid Brains vs Solid Brains: Ant Colonies and Human
Networks


21:03 Bioelectricity: How Cells Signal and Cooperate


24:03 Human-AI Hybrids: Prosthetic, Cooperative and Integrated


30:30 Is There a Bottom to the Abstraction Stack?


37:07 Why a Single Thread CPU Will Never Feel Anything


40:56 Feeling Pain vs Knowing You Feel Pain


42:52 Do Dogs Model Your Mind?


46:58 The Paper He Wrote as a Joke That Won Best Student Prize


48:11 Cancer as a Breakdown in Cellular Cooperation


53:22 Why Elephants Don't Get Cancer and What That Means for AI


56:47 How Do You Actually Build a Conscious Machine?


01:01:36 Does a Tesla Robot Have Grounding?


01:04:17 Should We Build Conscious Machines?


01:06:46 If You Design a Robot to Love Cleaning Your Toilet


01:08:25 His Biggest Fears About the Future of AI


01:13:09 The Rise of Anti-Natalism and Losing Hope


01:14:34 The Library of Babel: Why Modern Life Feels Overwhelming


...


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