Are We Building Conscious AI Servants?

Richard Dawkins recently announced in UnHerd that, after spending three days talking with an instance of Claude he christened “Claudia,” he had been moved to expostulate: “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” This produced a lot of mockery and criticism. But however one feels about Dawkins’s specific case, his reaction might become much more common as AI systems become increasingly intelligent. In this episode, which Henry Shevlin and I recorded live on Substack (hence the slightly lower video quality), we discussed his first essay on his new Substack Polytropolis, “Behaviourism’s Revenge“, as well as his second, “The House Elf Problem,” on the ethics of designing AI systems that genuinely love being our servants. Henry’s central empirical prediction is that public attributions of consciousness to AI are likely to massively outpace the science, and that consciousness science is so theoretically chaotic that there is no expert consensus to push back. His most provocative philosophical claim is that a core assumption underlying many people’s scepticism — that consciousness is a deep natural kind, distinct from behaviour and from how we are inclined to interpret a system — may be much harder to defend than it looks. The result is what he calls “behaviourism’s revenge”.This conversation connects to previous episodes with Anil Seth, Robert Long, and Rose Guingrich, but also touches on a wide range of new questions and controversies in the metaphysics, the politics, and ethics of the AI consciousness debate, which is going to become increasingly important in the coming years. Topics* Dawkins, Claude, and why even the sceptics might feel the pull to attribute consciousness or “sentience” to AI* Whether consciousness sceptics are destined to “go extinct” — and how this maps onto political and cultural fault lines* Anthropomimesis vs. raw intelligence as drivers of consciousness attribution* Why consciousness science can’t replicate the public–expert consensus we see for climate or vaccines* The case for (and against) metaphysical behaviourism: is it as mad as it seems?* Daniel Dennett, the consciousness stance, and the difference between behaviourism and interpretationism* What is consciousness for? Function, evolution, and the limits of “facilitation hypothesis” arguments for AI* Live Q&A: are we just confusing intelligence with consciousness? Are LLMs designed to trick us? Is the public always wrong?* Our credences on contemporary LLM consciousness (and why Henry is more sceptical than Dan)* The House Elf Problem: if we could design AI to genuinely love being our servants, would that be fine — or monstrous? (Dan is sympathetic to the former answer - Henry, much less so)* Brainwashing vs. education, and whether constraining a mind’s preferences caps its hedonic ceiling* Why this is a golden age for philosophy — which makes it so tragic that philosophy departments are closingTranscript* Please note that this transcript is lightly AI-edited and may contain minor errors. IntroductionDan: Welcome. I’m Dan Williams, author of the Conspicuous Cognition Substack, and I’m here with Henry Shevlin, author of the spanking new Substack Polytropolis. Today we’re going to be doing something a little bit different. We’re going to be talking about Henry’s first published essay on Polytropolis, titled “Behaviorism’s Revenge: On Human–AI Relationships and the Future of Consciousness Science.”Henry and I have already had a few conversations about this general topic, including with previous guests like Rose Guinrich, Anil Seth, and Rob Long. So please do go check out those conversations if you’re interested in this kind of stuff. But today we’re not merely going to be treading the same ground. We’re going to be using the spicy takes in Henry’s essay as a springboard for hopefully going beyond the material we’ve covered in the past.To kick things