Can AI Become Conscious? — With Michael Pollan

Can AIs be conscious? Now that we have a better understanding of the mind, we might have some answers to that question. That's coming up with best-selling author Michael Pollan right after this. Welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Today we have a great show for you.

We are going to drill into the depths of artificial intelligence's ability to achieve consciousness, and we're going to do it with the perfect person. We have Michael Pollan here. He is the author of the book. A World Appears, A Journey into Consciousness that is out this week from Penguin Press. Michael, great to see you.

Welcome to the show. Good to see you, Alex. So let's just start with consciousness. Um, the first thing that I really felt while reading your book, because you describe consciousness in many different ways, is just that consciousness is kind of amazing, and we're gonna get into whether AIs can achieve it. But just strictly on the human side of things to start, I mean, it is amazing in some ways that yes, we're we're here, but we have this awareness of ourselves uh in the universe that's just kind of mind-blowing the fact that it exists.

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