Anil Seth

speaker

1,118 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Anil Seth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Know Thyself · E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

So if people think that AIs are conscious, then we may still give them rights.

We may still extend welfare protection.

We may still get ourselves into a situation where we're regulated out of being able to turn off an AI because it might be considered murder.

And if we're doing this because we think they're conscious when they're not, then what we're in fact doing is we're really hampering our ability to exercise control and regulation over technologies that are already very difficult to control and regulate.

We've been making the problem of AI alignment much harder than it already is.

And it already is very, very hard.

So that's one problem.

Another one is it's bad for us too.

You mentioned the other films like Her and Ex Machina and

I think it's very plausible that if we interact with AI systems that seem to be conscious, we're much more easily exploited psychologically.

We may form parasocial relationships with these systems more readily.

We might do what they say.

more easily, more quickly if we really believe that they really feel for us, that they really empathize with us, that they really understand us.

And there's been plenty of examples of, you know, what in quotes is called AI psychosis or people just doing things that are very detrimental to themselves and society after interactions with chatbots.

It's alarming, but there's plenty worse than that as well.

There are people taking their lives.

There are people going down all kinds of rabbit holes.

And then there's very little data on whether this is, how much this is modulated by whether people believe the AI is conscious.

So I don't think there is like, there's not really hard data on that, but it does seem plausible enough to worry about.

And we've already seen with social media that social media technologies can come for our attention.

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