Sustainable Media Center Substack

Anil Seth is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists studying consciousness and has spent three decades working on one of the hardest questions in science: what consciousness is and where it comes from. He is professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the U.K. and directs the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science.

In Vancouver for a TED conference, he knew exactly who he was talking to and why reaching them now mattered.

TED is an audience of scientists, builders, philosophers and investors. Many of them are betting, some of them literally, on AI becoming conscious in the near future. A few argue it’s not technically achievable.

Seth’s position is more urgent and more unsettling than either camp: It’s not that conscious AI is impossible. It’s that it’s a terrible idea and we should stop trying to build it.

That’s a different argument. And it’s one the room needed to hear.