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The Sentience Institute Podcast

Sentience Institute

23 episodes

6 months ago

“I call this the emotional alignment design policy. So the idea is that corporations, if they create sentient machines, should create them so that it's obvious to users that they're sentient. And so they evoke appropriate emotional reactions to sentient users. So you don't create a sentient machine and then put it in a bland box that no one will have emotional reactions to. And conversely, don't create a non sentient machine that people will attach to so much and think it's sentient that they...

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Social Sciences

Society & Culture,

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“I call this the emotional alignment design policy. So the idea is that corporations, if they create sentient machines, should create them so that it's obvious to users that they're sentient. And so they evoke appropriate emotional reactions to sentient users. So you don't create a sentient machine and then put it in a bland box that no one will have emotional reactions to. And conversely, don't create a non sentient machine that people will attach to so much and think it's sentient that they...

Show more...

Social Sciences

Society & Culture,

Episodes (20/23)

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Eric Schwitzgebel on user perception of the moral status of AI

“I call this the emotional alignment design policy. So the idea is that corporations, if they create sentient machines, should create them so that it's obvious to users that they're sentient. And so they evoke appropriate emotional reactions to sentient users. So you don't create a sentient machine and then put it in a bland box that no one will have emotional reactions to. And conversely, don't create a non sentient machine that people will attach to so much and think it's sentient that they...

1 year ago

57 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Raphaël Millière on large language models

“Ultimately, if you want more human-like systems that exhibit more human-like intelligence, you would want them to actually learn like humans do by interacting with the world and so interactive learning, not just passive learning. You want something that's more active where the model is going to actually test out some hypothesis, and learn from the feedback it's getting from the world about these hypotheses in the way children do, it should learn all the time. If you observe young babies and ...

1 year ago

1 hour 49 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Matti Wilks on human-animal interaction and moral circle expansion

“Speciesism being socially learned is probably our most dominant theory of why we think we're getting the results that we're getting. But to be very clear, this is super early research. We have a lot more work to do. And it's actually not just in the context of speciesism that we're finding this stuff. So basically we've run some studies showing that while adults will prioritize humans over even very large numbers of animals in sort of tragic trade-offs, children are much more likely to prior...

2 years ago

1 hour 6 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

David Gunkel on robot rights

“Robot rights are not the same thing as a set of human rights. Human rights are very specific to a singular species, the human being. Robots may have some overlapping powers, claims, privileges, or immunities that would need to be recognized by human beings, but their grouping or sets of rights will be perhaps very different.”David GunkelCan and should robots and AI have rights? What’s the difference between robots and AI? Should we grant robots rights even if they aren’t sentient? What might...

2 years ago

1 hour 4 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Kurt Gray on human-robot interaction and mind perception

“And then you're like, actually, I can't know what it's like to be a bat—again, the problem of other minds, right? There's this fundamental divide between a human mind and a bat, but at least a bat's a mammal. What is it like to be an AI? I have no idea. So I think [mind perception] could make us less sympathetic to them in some sense because it's—I don't know, they're a circuit board, there are these algorithms, and so who knows? I can subjugate them now under the heel of human desire becaus...

2 years ago

59 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Thomas Metzinger on a moratorium on artificial sentience development

And for an applied ethics perspective, I think the most important thing is if we want to minimize suffering in the world, and if we want to minimize animal suffering, we should always, err on the side of caution, we should always be on the safe side. Thomas MetzingerShould we advocate for a moratorium on the development of artificial sentience? What might that look like, and what would be the challenges?Thomas Metzinger was a full professor of theoretical philosophy at the Johannes Guten...

2 years ago

1 hour 50 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Tobias Baumann of the Center for Reducing Suffering on global priorities research and effective strategies to reduce suffering

“We think that the most important thing right now is capacity building. We’re not so much focused on having impact now or in the next year, we’re thinking about the long term and the very big picture… Now, what exactly does capacity building mean? It can simply mean getting more people involved… I would frame it more in terms of building a healthy community that’s stable in the long term… And one aspect that’s just as important as the movement building is that we need to improve our knowledge...

3 years ago

1 hour 16 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Tobias Baumann of the Center for Reducing Suffering on moral circle expansion, cause prioritization, and reducing risks of astronomical suffering in the long-term future

“If some beings are excluded from moral consideration then the results are usually quite bad, as evidenced by many forms of both current and historical suffering… I would definitely say that those that don’t have any sort of political representation or power are at risk. That’s true for animals right now; it might be true for artificially sentient beings in the future… And yeah, I think that is a plausible priority. Another candidate would be to work on other broad factors to improve th...

3 years ago

1 hour 18 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Jo Anderson of Faunalytics and Saulius Šimčikas of Rethink Priorities on research for effective animal advocacy

We [Faunalytics] put out a lot of things in 2020. Some of the favorites that I [Jo] have, probably top of the list, I’m really excited about our animal product impact scales, where we did a lot of background research to figure out and estimate the impact of replacing various animal products with plant-based or cultivated alternatives. Apart from that, we’ve also done some research on people’s beliefs about chickens and fish that’s intended as a starting point on a program of research so that ...

4 years ago

1 hour 35 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Ajay Dahiya of The Pollination Project on funding grassroots animal advocacy and inner transformation

“Why inner transformation, why these practices are also built into model: unless we root out the root cause of the issue, which is disconnection, which is a lack of understanding that we are interrelated, and therefore I have an inherent responsibility to show up in the world with kindness and compassion and to reduce the harm and the suffering that I cause in the world. Unless we’re able to do that, these problems are still going to exist. The issues of race relations still exist. How many y...

4 years ago

1 hour 43 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Oscar Horta of the University of Santiago de Compostela on how we can best help wild animals

“The main work that really needs to be carried out here is work in the intersection of animal welfare science and the science of ecology and other fields in life science… You could also build a career, not as a scientist, but say, in public administration or government. And you can reach a position in policy-making that can be relevant for the field, so there are plenty of different options there… Getting other interventions accepted and implemented would require significant lobby work. And t...

4 years ago

1 hour 19 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Oscar Horta of the University of Santiago de Compostela on why we should help wild animals

“We want there to be animals like elephants, who on average have very good lives, rather than animals who tend to have very bad lives… If you have, say, a population of animals who reproduce by laying a million eggs. On average, only two of them would survive… Due to how the life history of animals is in many cases, we are not really speaking here about exceptions but rather about the norm. It's very common for animals to have lives that contain more suffering — sometimes much more suffering ...

4 years ago

1 hour 28 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Leah Garcés of Mercy For Animals on factory farm investigations, long-term strategy, and animal advocacy during COVID-19

“Our challenge is one where investigations are very hard. The people who do this work, I cannot tell you how smart they are. They are doing all kinds of research, not just getting the footage. The footage is the last thing they’re getting; they’re doing so much more to be able achieve that footage, including thinking strategically through: How do we achieve that strategic plan that we’ve laid out which includes securing broiler policies, enforcing egg policies. And what we’re trying to do is ...

4 years ago

1 hour 35 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Frank Baumgartner of UNC-Chapel Hill on policy dynamics, lobbying, and issue framing

“In my career, one of the things that I’ve focused on the most is developing the theory of punctuated equilibrium. And I think recognising that things occasionally go through real transformations with radical change has changed people’s understanding of what we can expect out of government. It’s a much more fruitful way to think about how policy changes within government. It is true that for the most part, governments are very status quo oriented. But every once in a while, that’s thrown out ...

4 years ago

1 hour 51 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Elliot Swartz of the Good Food Institute on the bottlenecks to the scale-up of cultured meat and plant-based meat

“There’s a relatively clear path on dramatically reducing the costs of the cell culture media. So I’d say it's definitely the most pressing bottleneck… not perhaps the most technically involved bottleneck… The recombinant proteins are by far the driving source of those cost contributions where probably anywhere from over 90 to 95% or more of the cost contribution of cell culture media today comes from those recombinant proteins. An independent group at Northwestern University in Chicago came ...

4 years ago

2 hours 21 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Laila Kassam of Animal Think Tank on popular protest movements, mass arrests, and publicity stunts

Social movements often seek to shift public opinion and mobilize supporters on a large scale. But which tactics achieve these goals most effectively? And how have social movements achieved this in the past?Dr Laila Kassam is a co-founder of Animal Think Tank and the co-editor of the forthcoming book, Rethinking Food and Agriculture: New Ways Forward.Topics discussed in the episode:“The social movement ecology” and the theoretical framework that Animal Think Tank uses (3:10)The importance of p...

5 years ago

1 hour 37 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Jayasimha Nuggehalli on capacity building and animal welfare in Asia

“The three things that need to be done for Asia are capacity building, capacity building, and capacity building. There’s this tendency of wanting to do things at a global level, having uniformization across countries. But a lot of these policies that are written at the global level are not worth the paper that they’re printed on if there isn’t enough or more focus on building capacity on the ground. And it requires someone with grit to be there at the local level, speaking the local language,...

5 years ago

1 hour 53 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Lisa Feria of Stray Dog Capital on impact investing and animal-free food tech entrepreneurship

I think we forget sometimes because we look at Impossible, we look at Beyond, that they’re the tip of the spear, but there’s so much work and so much opportunity out there… We need to get to all the categories… Seafood in general is very, very underserved. And so getting access to amazing talented entrepreneurs who are going to focus on seafood… there’s a huge opportunity there, because that is such a level of high need. And there’s other categories like that, but I think… cheap, plant-based ...

5 years ago

1 hour 43 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Christie Lagally of Rebellyous Foods on scaling up high-quality plant-based foods

Since about 75% or so (and that’s just a rough estimate)... of plant-based products on the market today are actually made on off-the-shelf meat processing equipment, we’re looking to actually change that part of the industry by actually designing new production equipment that is appropriate for the production of plant-based meat… By creating new production methods and new equipment at Rebellyous, we can bring down the cost of plant-based meat, increase the quality, and increase the volume of ...

5 years ago

1 hour 8 minutes

The Sentience Institute Podcast

Kristof Dhont of University of Kent on intergroup contact research and research careers

More positive contact [with an outgroup] reduces prejudice. No matter how you measure it, no matter how you set up your study design, once there’s a positive contact situation, you lower prejudice towards the outgroup... These effects tend to be stronger among those higher on social dominance orientation and those higher on right-wing authoritarianism, which makes intergroup contact quite a good and efficient strategy to reduce prejudice among those who seem to be initially prejudiced towards...

5 years ago

1 hour 54 minutes