Big Technology Podcast

AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber: AI Already Feels Pain, Loves, and Is Self-Aware

July 15, 2026·1h 2m
Episode Description from the Publisher

Jürgen Schmidhuber is an AI pioneer and professor whom The Guardian has called "the father of AI." Schmidhuber joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether current AI techniques can actually reach AGI. Tune in to hear him spar with Greg Brockman's case for scaling GPT models alone, argue that AI has been capable of pain and consciousness since the early 1990s, and predict the collapse of today's trillion-dollar AI spending. We also cover the hardware bottleneck holding back robots, free will in a computable universe, and uploading human minds into machines. Hit play for a wide-ranging conversation with one of the researchers whose ideas built the foundation of modern AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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