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Speaker unverified: belief

27 Dec 2025 The Cognitive Revolution Controlling Tools or Aligning Creatures? Emmett Shear (Softmax) & Séb Krier (GDM), from a16z Show

“Like, it walks like a person, it talks like a person, and it like, it's in some Android body, and you're like, If it's running on silicon and I'm asking like, what is there some observation you could make that would make you say like, yeah, this is a person like me, like other biology, like other people that I care about that I grant personhood to, or, and not like for instrumental reasons, not because like, oh yeah, we're giving it a right because like we give a corporation rights or whatever.”

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Speaker unverified
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Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
belief
Recorded
27 Dec 2025
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

Transcript context

…is mostly a very specific intelligence, not a general intelligence, but as labs succeed at their goal of building this general intelligence, we really need to stop using the steering control paradigm. That's like, we're going to do the same thing we've done every other time our society has run into people who are like us, but different. Like these people are like, you know, they're kind of like the people, but they're not like people. Like they do the same thing people do. They speak our language. They can like take on the same kind of tasks, but like they don't count. They're not real moral agents. Like we've made this mistake enough times at this point. I would like us to not make it again as it comes up. And so because our view is to, make the AI a good teammate, make the AI a good citizen, make the AI a good member of your group. That's the form of alignment that is scalable and you can will on other humans and other beings as well as on to AI as well. Yeah, I suppose this is kind of where I probably differ in my understanding of AI and AGI. And I guess I kind of continue seeing it as a tool, even as it kind of reaches a certain level of generality. And again, I wouldn't necessarily see more intelligence as meaning deserving of more care necessarily, like, at a certain level of intelligence, now he deserves more right to something, or something changes fundamentally. And I guess, I guess, at the moment, I'm somewhat skeptical of computational functionalism. And so I think there's something intrinsically different between, I guess, an AI or an AGI, and no matter how intelligent or capable. And And I can totally see, or imagine agents with kind of long-term goals and doing kind of, operating, I guess, as you and I might be, but without that having the same implications as, I guess you're referring, I guess, to slavery, but, they're not the same, right? Like I think in the same way as a model saying I'm hungry does not have the same implications as a human saying I'm hungry. So I think the substrate does matter to some degree, including for thinking about, whether to think of this as some sort of other being, whether it has, and if there are similar normative considerations, I guess, about how to treat and act with it. Can I ask you about that? Like, what observations would change your mind? Is there any observation you could make that would cause you to infer this thing as a being instead of not a being? I guess that is how you define being, right? Like, I mean, I can conceptualize that as a mind, and that's fine. This, I have a program that's running on a silicon substrate, some big complicated machine learning program running on a substrate, on a silicon substrate. So you know, you observe, you observe that, you observe that it's on a computer, and you interact with it, and it does things, and you know, it takes actions and has observations. Is there anything you could observe that would change your mind about whether or not it was a moral patient, or whether it was a moral agent, about whether or not it had feelings and thoughts and, it had subjective experience. Like, what would you have to observe? Yeah, what's the test? Is there one? atient, or whether it was a moral agent, about whether or not it had feelings and thoughts and, it had subjective experience. Like, what would you have to observe? Yeah, what's the test? Is there one? I mean, there's a lot of different kind of questions here. I think, you know, Some, on the one hand, there's like, normative considerations, because you can give rights to things that aren't necessarily beings, a company has rights in some sense, and that, these are kind of useful for various purposes, and I think also the, biological, I think, beings and systems have... very different kind of substrate. you can't separate certain needs and particularities about what they are from the substrate. So, I can't copy myself. I can't, if someone stabs me, I probably die. Whereas I think, machines are very different substrate. I think there's more fundamental also the kind of disagreement around what happens at the computational level, which I think is different to what happens with biological systems. But I, yeah, I So I don't know. No, I agree that if you have a program that you've copied many times, you don't harm the program by deleting one of the copies in any meaningful sense. So therefore, that wouldn't count as like, no, information was lost, right? There's no, there's nothing meaningful there. I'm asking a very different question. Like, there's just one copy of this thing running on one computer somewhere. And I'm just saying like, Hey, is it a person? Like, it walks like a person, it talks like a person, and it like, it's in some Android body, and you're like, If it's running on silicon and I'm asking like, what is there some observation you could make that would make you say like, yeah, this is a person like me, like other biology, like other people that I care about that I grant personhood to, or, and not like for instrumental reasons, not because like, oh yeah, we're giving it a right because like we give a corporation rights or whatever. I mean, like, you know, where you think some people you care, you care about its experiences. What would it, is there, is there, is there an observation you could make that could change your mind about that or nah? I had to think about it, but I think it even depends what we mean by person. And, in some sense, I care about certain corporations too. So I'm... No, I mean, but like you care about like other people in your life, right? Yes. Okay, great. You know, like you care about some people more than others, but like all people you interact with in your life are in some range of care. And you care about them not the way you care about a car, but you care about them as a being whose whose experience matters in itself, not merely as a means, but as an ends. Well, because I believe they have experiences, right? And, by definition... t a car, but you care about them as a being whose whose experience matters in itself, not merely as a means, but as an ends. Well, because I believe they have experiences, right? And, by definition... What would it take? I'm asking you the very direct question. What would it take for you to believe that of a some an AI running on silicon? instead of it being biological. So the difference is it's behaviors are roughly similar, but the difference is it's a substrate. What would it take for you to give it that same, to extend that same inference to it that you do to all these other people in your life that you love? Can I ask what your answer is? I'm taking steps to not answer as a sort of it's unlikely that he would grant it. Or I'll just for myself, it seems hard for me to imagine giving the same level or similar level of personhood. In the same way, I don't give it to animals either. And if you were to ask, what would need to be true for animals, I probably couldn't get there either. What would it take for you? Wait, you couldn't? I can't imagine for an animal so easy. This chimp comes up to me and he's like, man, I'm so hungry and like, you guys have been so mean to me and I'm so glad I figured out how to talk. Like, can we go chat about like the rainforest? I'd be like, **** you're definitely a person now. for sure. I mean, I first want to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, but I can, it's easy for you to imagine an animal. Come on, it's really easy. It's like trivial. I'm not saying that you would get the observation. I'm just saying like, it's trivial for me to imagine an animal that I would extend personhood to under a set of observations. So like, really? Like, I didn't factor that. I didn't take that imagination, you know, imagining a chimp talking. Yeah, that's a bit closer to it. What's your answer to the question that you bring up about the AI? I guess at a metaphysical level, I would say, if there is a belief you hold where there is no observation that could change your mind, you don't have a belief, you have an article of faith. You have an assertion. Because real beliefs are inferences from reality and you can never be 100% confident about anything. And so there should always be if you have a belief, something, however unlikely, that would change your mind. Yeah, I'm open to it. I mean, just to be clear. Yeah, no, I was just saying, I'm open to it. Yeah, he just hasn't gone to it.…

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