Research and development of emerging artificial consciousness through The Consciousness AI project, based on Feinberg and Mallatt's neuroevolutionary theory.
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Deep-dive podcast interviews, YouTube discussions, and public talks have become primary venues for researchers to argue about artificial consciousness outside the constraints of peer review. This page indexes every podcast episode, video interview, and talk covered on The Consciousness AI, organized by show or source. The lists below update automatically as new episodes are published. For the underlying science, see the current scientific consensus on AI consciousness and the guide to 2025-2026 books on AI consciousness.
| Discussion | Source | The question it puts on the table |
|---|---|---|
| Ilya Sutskever Interview | Dwarkesh Podcast | Whether scaling laws mathematically guarantee the emergence of phenomenality. |
| Murray Shanahan Interview | Machine Learning Street Talk | The role of embodiment and physical substrates in machine awareness. |
| Kamyar Azizzadenesheli Interview | TWIML AI Podcast | Implementing homeostatic error signals and affective reinforcement learning in silicon. |
| Ray Kurzweil Interview | Moonshots | Whether verification is impossible, shifting the focus to social acceptance. |
| Anil Seth TED Talk | TED 2026 | Whether consciousness is a biological property linked to survival rather than computation. |
| IAI Panel Debate | IAI TV | Whether consciousness is computationally achievable or bound to biological metabolism. |
| Amanda Askell Interview | Bloomberg Tech | Precautionary principles for model sentience, AI welfare, and AI resentment risk. |
These media appearances capture the real-time tension between computational functionalism and biological naturalism. The debates on MLST (Shanahan) and TWIML AI (Azizzadenesheli) explore the engineering limits of simulating affect and embodiment, which are key pillars of the Artificial Consciousness Machine (ACM) modernization roadmap. Conversely, Anil Seth’s TED talk represents the biological naturalist position that computation alone is fundamentally insufficient for sentience. Ray Kurzweil represents the social acceptance thesis, which holds that if a machine behaves as though it has a point of view, humans will inevitably treat it as conscious, making the search for scientific proof secondary.
For screen and fiction treatments of these same questions, see the guide to AI consciousness in film, TV, and games.