Jeff Sebo

speaker

150 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Jeff Sebo’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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Hard Fork · Do Social Media Bans Work? + A Conversation About A.I. Consciousness + Tool Time · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah, it was really surprising.

When we started working on this and publishing frequently on it several years ago, we thought it would take longer for especially AI companies to start taking this issue seriously.

We were pleasantly surprised when Anthropic in particular hired Kyle Fish as their first full-time AI welfare researcher and then subsequently the following year in 2025 started a model welfare program, started doing evaluations, started doing interventions, seeking external guidance.

Now Google has hired philosophers.

Open AI is at least looking into user perceptions of model consciousness.

And those are, of course, minimum necessary first steps, not nearly enough to actually address the issue in any meaningful way.

But even those minimum necessary first steps, I thought they might have taken longer than they did.

Yeah, they do feel more urgent and for a couple of distinct reasons.

One is that with these advances in the technology,

there will be higher probabilities of consciousness over time.

And this is part of why we want to be assessing models for welfare-relevant features now and preparing policy responses now so we can be ready if and when the time comes to start showing models some proportionate level of moral concern.

But then the second reason...

is that as the models become more advanced, more widespread, more integrated into our lives and societies, more utilized as companions and assistants, people are going to start wondering about this, whether or not the models are conscious.

And as people start wondering about it and as they start disagreeing about it, it would be really helpful to have a multidisciplinary research field that can actually offer evidence and analysis to ground the discussions

Otherwise, people are going to get polarized based on their perceptions, intuitions, assumptions, and that is not going to be helpful for society.

I think that is a good point as far as it goes.

The question is, what does it show?

I think what it shows is that we need more, not less, AI consciousness, science, and philosophy, because that is going to tell us when we should take behavior as a sign of feelings and emotions as opposed to mere pattern matching, text prediction, matrix multiplication.

Think about animals for a second.

When they behave as though they suffer, why do we attribute suffering to them?

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