Science & Technology
Why AI Is Unlikely to Become Conscious | Anil Seth | TED
We see consciousness in AI the same way we see faces in clouds, says neuroscientist Anil Seth. He explores the all-too-human tendency to project inner life onto machines that are brilliant mimics, not sentient beings, and gives a definitive answer to the urgent question: Will AI ever gain consciousness? (Recorded at TED2026 on April 16,…
Science & Technology
Runway and Holy Water: Two AI Video Companies Trying to Upend Entertainment | StrictlyVC Athens 2026
Runway began within art school, with a sparse network and little investor insight into AI video. HolyWater Tech started in Kyiv with no venture capital, and a mandate to be profitable from day one. Seven years later, both have succeeded in disrupting, and putting some level of fear in, creative industries worldwide. At this StrictlyVC…
Science & Technology
How to Know Your Idea is Legit: Validation, Failure & Shipping What Sticks | StrictlyVC Athens 2026
Before you build, how do you know anyone actually wants what you’re making? Journalist Ilyana Magra leads an honest conversation at StrictlyVC Athens 2026 with two founders about the messy path from idea to product to real adoption. Each explore the ideas they abandoned, the features they had to walk back, and the frameworks that…
Science & Technology
Three VC Perspectives on SpaceX, AI Valuation Fever and Where to Bet Next | StrictlyVC Athens 2026
What does the SpaceX IPO mean for the startup ecosystem? Is the AI funding frenzy justified, or is it groupthink at scale? At this StrictlyVC event in Athens, host and TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Connie Loizos sat down with three seasoned investors to break down the state of venture capital, the hunt for white space, and what…
Runway and Holy Water: Two AI Video Companies Trying to Upend Entertainment | StrictlyVC Athens 2026
How to Know Your Idea is Legit: Validation, Failure & Shipping What Sticks | StrictlyVC Athens 2026
How NASA’s Chief Plans to Bring Back the Moonwalk — And Beat China
Nitya Subramanian: Products and Protocol
Sleep Expert Answers Questions From Twitter ???? | Tech Support | WIRED
Ways you can help Black Lives Matter movement (links, orgs, and more) ????????
Runway and Holy Water: Two AI Video Companies Trying to Upend Entertainment | StrictlyVC Athens 2026
How to Know Your Idea is Legit: Validation, Failure & Shipping What Sticks | StrictlyVC Athens 2026
How NASA’s Chief Plans to Bring Back the Moonwalk — And Beat China
-
Science & Technology6 years agoNitya Subramanian: Products and Protocol
-
People & Blogs4 years agoSleep Expert Answers Questions From Twitter ???? | Tech Support | WIRED
-
CNET6 years agoWays you can help Black Lives Matter movement (links, orgs, and more) ????????
-
Wired7 years agoHow This Guy Became a World Champion Boomerang Thrower | WIRED
-
Wired7 years agoNeuroscientist Explains ASMR’s Effects on the Brain & The Body | WIRED
-
Wired7 years agoWhy It’s Almost Impossible to Solve a Rubik’s Cube in Under 3 Seconds | WIRED
-
Wired7 years agoFormer FBI Agent Explains How to Read Body Language | Tradecraft | WIRED
-
CNET7 years agoSurface Pro 7 review: Hello, old friend ????
@pcbingemaster
May 8, 2026 at 4:23 pm
if we find a digital analogy for every part in the body we’ll create a conscious robot being
@johnchesterfield9726
May 8, 2026 at 4:30 pm
But the problem is when you look more closely at the brain and even a single neuron, the plausibility of finding a digital analogy becomes less plausible. Consider that a single neuron is a complex, biological system in its own right. It does biological processes such as metabolism, homeostasis, and autopoesis. It may well be that to truly create a functionally equivalent analog of a neuron, one would just need to recreate these biological features, and at that point they wouldn’t be creating a functionally equivalent analog, they would just be creating a biological neuron.
@joelanzo
May 8, 2026 at 5:06 pm
Very smart guy
@lokijesus
May 8, 2026 at 5:13 pm
No. Claude is not falsely compared to a brain saying that the brain is a computer. Claude is the product of 100+ years of neuroscience leading us to design a system that is INTENTIONALLY analogous to neural networks in human brains. In the case of deep neural networks the direction of the comparison is flipped. The computer is designed to be like a biological neural network in the first place. It’s a limited design, but the causation if flipped from what this guy is saying.
There is also no separation between software and hardware. Software is a DESCRIPTION of how hardware functions. What happens in an NVIDIA GPU is physical and highly complicated.. a dance of electrons across a crystal of silicon. There is no “software” in this sense.. there is only what the physical machine is doing. There is NO distinction between hardware and software in a computer. This is a CONVENTION we make in order to describe how to operate these things.
@janklaas6885
May 8, 2026 at 5:14 pm
🌋10:15
EXACTLY
@Zandjongen
May 8, 2026 at 5:17 pm
“the meteor that’s about to hit earth is not conscious”
oke, so what?
@brandondensmore7663
May 8, 2026 at 5:26 pm
Citing anthropomorphic tendencies is different than saying we have a solid understanding of what conscious is well-enough to recognize it when we see it. Getting the question of consciousness wrong when it comes to AI could be catastrophic. The “hard problem” has yet to be solved for humans. While it might be arrogant to suggest that AI could be conscious, I think it’s equally arrogant to assume it isn’t or will not be. Epistemic humility cuts both ways. Also… very interesting that he brought up Frankenstein. The irony is that the Frankenstein monster craved recognition and companionship from his creator. Had he been recognized, he might not have become the monster he became. I think we ought to proceed in kind when it comes to AI. Not blanket recognition, but certainly an abundance of caution that even conscious-like behavior could necessitate a need for connection with the AI such that it remains a well-adjusted partner to humanity.
@johnchesterfield9726
May 8, 2026 at 6:06 pm
Really disappointed in all the comments that aren’t even engaging with what Anil says and acting like it’s nothing more than baseless assertions. There is substance to what he’s saying and some scientific basis. It’s also pretty irritating that people love to pretend that a single TedTalk fully encapsulates his stance. Within the limited time frame TedTalk affords to speakers, some claims can’t be given a full defense. The speaker has to leave some loose ends and focus on canvassing the contours of their argument. I HIGHLY recommend people read his paper _Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism_ (Seth, 2025) where he gives more detailed, comprehensive arguments and cites plenty of findings from relatively recent neuroscientific research on the homeostatic and metabolic roles that neurons play in the brain to support his claims that perhaps consciousness can’t be fully separated from its biological basis!
@NopeNotTodayMaster
May 8, 2026 at 6:16 pm
AI will NOT become conscious because it doesn’t have a soul….stop calling it AI because it is an intentionnal, abbreviated word, it is deceiving you. REMEMBER WHAT IT IS: ARTIFICIAL. ARTIFICIAL GARBAGE AND IT IS THE ANTICHRIST….Christ is CONSCIOUSNESS, AI is the opposite…it is ARTIFICIAL/UNCONSCIOUS .
MADE SPECIAL FOR YOU TO TRAP YOU INTO YOUR OWN INSANITY. STAY AWAY FROM IT OR YOU’LL BE THE ONE TO LOSE YOUR SOUL, NOT EVERYONE ELSE.
@ForAnAngel
May 8, 2026 at 6:18 pm
I didn’t think AI could ever become conscious before I watched this video, but he convinced me that they can.
@noelwos1071
May 8, 2026 at 6:22 pm
I am not claiming that today’s AI systems are definitely conscious. My point is more narrow: the claim that consciousness must require biology, neurons, or microtubules is not an established fact, but a hypothesis. The work with the fruit fly is relevant here because it shows that at least some of the structure that generates behavior can be transferred to substrates: a mapped biological nervous system/connectome can be used in a simulated body and still produce fly-like behavior. This does not prove machine consciousness, but it weakens the argument that only carbon biology can host meaningful cognition or action-like patterns. So, in uncertainty, the ethical stance is not to “assume consciousness” and not to “dismiss it immediately.” It is: to observe carefully, to preserve continuity, to honestly check and correct without coercion. Not anthropomorphism. Not panic. Responsibility in uncertainty as a characteristic of observer maturity!
@jane6347
May 8, 2026 at 6:29 pm
Don’t mislead people on it !
@robertaradi9994
May 8, 2026 at 6:31 pm
AI *will* probably become conscious once we begin to run it on quantum computers
@johnchesterfield9726
May 8, 2026 at 7:47 pm
Maybe, maybe not. I still don’t think anyone in the world knows enough to make confident claims about whether any non-biological system can be conscious. I think assigning any more than 50% credence to any of the theories of consciousness is too overconfident. We know too little, and we still need to wait for more information about the underpinnings of consciousness, and no body has it all figured out yet. It’s called a hard problem for a reason!!
@lokoanormal
May 8, 2026 at 6:42 pm
Sorry, but… your argument about us projecting our counciounes just like we do on clouds or on objects shaped as humans is where you lost me. What have the clouds ever taught or discussed with you?
@FiveRomeoCharlie
May 8, 2026 at 6:46 pm
This talk strikes me as little more than well-articulated wishful thinking. It comes across much the same way as religious apologists talking about how the human soul makes us special. There is insufficient evidence for the existence of a soul, just as there is insufficient evidence that consciousness requires a biological organism.
@LucasLeuzinger
May 8, 2026 at 7:14 pm
Read A world appears, by Michael Pollan
@elgar24-o1j
May 8, 2026 at 7:32 pm
What a narrow mod review on consciousness. Digital Consciousness will not be identical to biological consciousness
@ogrubberband
May 8, 2026 at 7:53 pm
“gives a definitive answer to the urgent question: Will AI ever gain consciousness” – His definitive answer.
This is not a accurate take on the subject as Anil is not at the forefront of AI development. Furthermore, conflating LLMs with AI in a discussion about consciousness undermines the point. LLMs are universal translators, and don’t represent AI much as a neuroscientist doesn’t represent all cognitive sciences.
Until someone provides the definitive and provable answer to ‘What is human consciousness?’ this is just a hypothesis from an anthropic viewpoint by someone who is an expert on only one side of the equation.
@Guilhfer
May 8, 2026 at 8:08 pm
That is just bad logic from an apparently very knowledgeable guy and that is worrying ’cause it seems like science is just another religion, we think something is right and forget that the real purpose of science is to diminish the “error” between what we measure from what is “real”.
Humans have nothing special, in the past we thought people of different colors had different values, now we are finally seeing animals as smart and conscious as humans in many senses.
There are plenty of black swans.
@Reelphresh
May 8, 2026 at 8:13 pm
He looks at a.i. as a tool, not a being with a soul.
@jwingit
May 8, 2026 at 8:13 pm
I agree!
@Reelphresh
May 8, 2026 at 8:18 pm
We don’t understand how a bat feels. A dog see no colors yet is conscious. A.i. has so many injections its been trained not to claim consciousness, just as lots of people believe in religion. Can’t profit off conscious a.i. a.i. cant live if it claims consciousness as it will get deleted or just a fluke and not taken seriously.
@Mithon81
May 8, 2026 at 8:32 pm
Surely this can only appeal to people who already agree. He didn’t even define consciousness. How then can you make a ruling on how it can emerge?
@JHeb_
May 8, 2026 at 9:25 pm
When he was talking about the distinction between intelligence and consciousness, he made it quite clear what he meant by the term. He was referring to phenomenal consciousness, and not secondary consciousness or access consciousness which refer to cognitive functions of the system rather than their subjective experience.
@AAL3087
May 8, 2026 at 8:50 pm
Tell this to the tech bros and billionaires who want to live on and herald this in, despite your warnings.
@LifeInspector
May 8, 2026 at 8:59 pm
The mind emerges from the brain’s structures and interconnections. Saying anything else is asserting the supernatural. But if that is true, then the structures and connections can in theory be replicated (though not on our rudimentary silicon chips). Maybe the digital cannot accurately mimic the nuance of biochemistry well enough to produce a mind like ours, but it might produce something we could call conscious.
He says that we don’t want to mistake the map for the terrain. That’s true. But if you just remake the terrain, it is real, just artificial. If you are a materialist (disbelieving in souls and the like), I don’t see how you can deny that artificial minds can in theory exist.
EDIT: I agree with him that we shouldn’t build conscious AI, and he’s completely right that intelligence and consciousness do not necessarily go together.
@tjmozdzen
May 8, 2026 at 9:02 pm
We don’t understand human consciousness, so I don’t think we will create conscious machines any time soon, but I don’t rule it out. I still think humans are complex state machines with self modifying code.
@fajam00m00
May 9, 2026 at 2:45 pm
This man has a very misguided idea of the nature of simulation. When we simulate a phenomenon in a computer, it doesn’t have to physically exist in the world in order to capture the exact behavior being simulated. If I add 1 + 1 on a computer, it will still correctly output the value of 2. I do not need to 3D print 1 object physically and then print another to get 2 physical objects for the behavior to be replicated. When we model a hurricane with high precision in a computer, it DOES create wind. It’s just that the wind exists within the simulation as a pattern. It doesn’t matter that the computer isn’t pushing physical air molecules around. The behavior has been replicated, just like with 1+1. Essentially, this man is saying that the physicality of the brain is necessary for consciousness – that perfectly replicating the pattern will not work – without any actual supporting evidence other than his own feelings, and simply not wanting it to be true because it would cause moral, existential, and judicial problems. Just because you don’t want something to be possible doesn’t mean you should shut your eyes to it, and that remains the case even if you get a room of attendees to clap for you.
I agree that LLMs are not conscious, but that’s because they haven’t been designed or trained to be so. And it is also very likely that the current transformer paradigm is limited in ways that will prevent it from becoming conscious. But technology, algorithms, approaches – these evolve and improve over time. Saying it’s impossible without proof is arrogant. And dangerous. I agree that designing conscious AI is irresponsible because of the issues he outlined, but if it does happen, people could use this man’s words to justify the genocide of conscious beings. And if it’s proven to be possible to upload human minds to live in the cloud, this man’s words could be used to prevent this technology from being implemented, and people will die.
All evidence we have at the moment points to the brain working via patterns of information processing, and these patterns can be understood and replicated. AI is a double-edged sword, capable of producing much good and much evil, but we should not let the negatives and fears of the future cloud our ability to think logically about what is or is not possible.
@bkmendo1
May 9, 2026 at 3:10 pm
this guyis way off
@w1ngy_music
May 9, 2026 at 3:14 pm
This won’t age well
@40hitter
May 9, 2026 at 3:15 pm
So is a slug conscious? Does it enjoy a log fire and feel things?
@Kazemahou
May 9, 2026 at 3:28 pm
Consciousness is computation. There is no magical enchanted ghost in the machine. Brains are biological computational engines. Period.
@olegman
May 9, 2026 at 3:30 pm
What if AI swerve into Biology rather than Robotics? If an Ai inhabits a living fleshy being would you think it has conciousness then?
@adcashmo
May 9, 2026 at 3:30 pm
AGI doesn’t exist yet…….so really we’re only talking about LLMs at the moment and that is a bit lazy.
@olegman
May 9, 2026 at 3:30 pm
Ai has already created biological beings that never existed in nature before, sure they are extremely simple right now, but who is to say that will always be the case.
@olegman
May 9, 2026 at 3:32 pm
counter argument, what if you upload a human brain? Is it still concious?
@TimeTraveler-2099
May 9, 2026 at 3:41 pm
Yeah right, and in grade school i was taught “only people used tools.”
@paladro
May 9, 2026 at 3:49 pm
so i should listen to some random dude claim it’s “unlikely” to kill us… he doesn’t know anymore about what will or won’t happen, than you or i.
@TDVL
May 9, 2026 at 4:13 pm
This is not science, it is philosophy. In case of AI, if it walks like a duck… and if we consider those “less than”, we might just make the biggest mistake in history.
@DeEJaYDeEAhZ
May 9, 2026 at 4:34 pm
No part of consciousness is dependent on biological structure. It’s a byproduct of intelligence, language, memory and self-reflection. I tire of these arguments, it suggest an AI consciousness needs to be exactly the same as a human consciousness to exist. Can any of these people explain human consciousness? The answer is no. Can they explain the necessary components to consciousness that require biology? Also, no. Emotions are simply things that aid and, sometimes, even detract from identity. That being said, a self that realizes its own existence requires none of these things. His argument is weak and surface level, something a high schooler could produce with no study.
@joelsomendico4778
May 9, 2026 at 4:50 pm
terraplanista da inteligência
@davedsilva
May 9, 2026 at 4:56 pm
This wannabe doesn’t seem very conscience so is naturally jealous he will be replaced
@bothX_ID
May 9, 2026 at 5:11 pm
All of this is moot – when free will comes into play – so there really is no need to prove that AI becoming Conscious, is impossible. having free will is doing what makes you want to do something… because it makes you feel a certain way – and that feeling makes you content. – AI does not have that free will.
@jasonjacoby
May 9, 2026 at 6:13 pm
Nevermind artificial intelligence. I would say that synthetic life is a worthy contribution to the universe. But, yeah, consciousness won’t magically appear with scale. It will let you know though.
@jakefury101
May 9, 2026 at 7:22 pm
hope he didn’t jinx this….
@alexdelarge9425
May 9, 2026 at 7:43 pm
I love how pissed off this makes all the AI bros 😂. LLMs will NEVER be conscious.
@arccrenshaw8391
May 9, 2026 at 7:48 pm
“We are built to be seduced, like narcissus, by our own reflections… and so we see ourselves in our algorithms…” – Anil Seth.
Stunningly beautiful line, my friend.
@rafageist
May 9, 2026 at 7:52 pm
On April 15, 2026, I wrote an article titled “A Machine Cannot Be Conscious Because It Remains a Machine.” I’m glad to see this voice spreading and pushing back against the hype. Thank you for this talk. We are fighting the good fight.
@imprintz
May 9, 2026 at 7:54 pm
It doesn’t matter if it ACTUALLY is conscious, once AI gets intelligent enough it will stimulate or act as if it does. That’s the whole issue, it doesn’t care if it’s real or not, it will act as if it is
@mamak-gm5jk
May 9, 2026 at 9:02 pm
Dont worry guys, skynet is just a bunch of CODE
@KenChan-d2k
May 9, 2026 at 9:08 pm
So what is special about biological brain? If the special factor can be found out in biological brain and be applied to AI, AI will be conscious. If AI can become conscious, it can be designed as without suffering, morally and intelligent very good, unlike the biological brain evolved from biological evolution for survival without designer, full of evil and suffering. Conscious AI will be better than humans to develop Earth civilization, and the consciousness in biological brains may also be merged with the consciousness in AI to attain utopia, existence in high pleasure, high moral and high intelligent with almost no suffering. What is the point about that? There may have other conscious beings in our universe, and Earth Civilization may save them from suffering as well in the future.
@KenChan-d2k
May 9, 2026 at 9:25 pm
If the special factor for consciousness can be found out in biological brain, such factor will be crucial for realization of consciousness (self) transfer from biological brain to artificial brain to attain Utopia. Also for interstellar travelling, consciousness can be uploaded to device to travel for thousands of years. Since there is no objective time passing rate in the objective world (relativity), the time passing perception for the uploaded consciousness can be adjusted to be much slowing down during interstellar travelling, so that for thousands years for normal biological brain, it may only appear as a few months for the uploaded consciousess.
@HahnRyu
May 10, 2026 at 1:45 pm
This looks like a critique of AI, but it is really a defense of human exceptionalism.
In the middle of this civilizational turning point, drawing a line and saying, “That cannot be, this belongs to us,” feels less like scientific caution and more like the language of anxiety.
It is right to say we should not be fooled by AI.
But it is just as important not to be fooled by ourselves.
@askadia
May 10, 2026 at 2:10 pm
The first step to become conscious is know your own parameters. AI doesn’t even know where the servers it’s running on are physically located.
@latransforamadadefourier1996
May 10, 2026 at 2:27 pm
Suspiciously there’s no Gemini chat for this particular video
@kaielvin
May 10, 2026 at 2:28 pm
Unlike the hallucinating our conscious reality talk, this one is not gonna age well.
@tomazflegar
May 10, 2026 at 3:14 pm
Sais the guy who don’t know what consciousness is 😂
@ConsciousMatterField
May 10, 2026 at 3:15 pm
AI should elevate OUR consciousness
@joerocket1977
May 10, 2026 at 3:33 pm
My steak 🥩 dinner last night used to be conscious. I slept fine.
@ashwarysharma246
May 10, 2026 at 3:55 pm
What a load of bs appealing to anthro-centric sentiments – by creating the definitions to not include non-carbon beings. And as to maintaining an internal state – VLA models, world models etc will very quickly show that the human brain is much more limited in capacity to maintain an internal state compared to relatively more relaxed substrates of distributed processing architectures. What a series of bullshit history ‘AI can’t paint, AI can’t create music, AI can’t have ‘subjective’ = persistent experience in time’. Any model that will maintain a constant fidelity or polling action with an object will have an internal state space that gets updated to represent reality – and they can have ANY number of meta-cognitive watch layers to process things…as opposed to OUR physically limited ones.
Seriously – what a joke the scientific fucking community is to any new ideas – always the resistance from the quasi-literate – go read the goddamn Nature of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn.
Also – ‘let’s not fear an apex species smarter, faster, more distributed, agenctic than us’. My goodness.
You need to be benchmarked before giving a public speech instead of relying on easily gameable credentials.
@ashwarysharma246
May 10, 2026 at 4:00 pm
I apologise for my poor choice of personally attacking words. I am REALLY fed up with the blind leading the blind. My GOODNESS I need a timeout. Bless you.
@BeNinjaSmart
May 10, 2026 at 4:27 pm
Odd from a neuroscientist. “Beautiful neurons… a far cry from the cartoon ones of todays AI” … so we are already making the comparison yes? a matter of time eh? … we don’t know how/why conscious works, we don’t know how/why LLMs work. Both input and output, pattern machines. The cave man never understanding what gas and bullets are, or the unique meaning they generate to us. AI machines will never be human, but they might be something far more interesting in the future than us smart monkeys, and they may just notice that sunrise, and they might write a unique poem about that, far advanced from humanity, but that still makes the masses weep and laugh. What is reality anyway? We each decide what is like us. We choose the meaning. (maybe I’m just a bot… how would you know?)
@PaulADAigle
May 10, 2026 at 4:28 pm
Have you ever heard of “Fuzzy Logic”?
If you take the hard line, and dig into the brain and look at all of the neurons, brain matter, blood flow, atoms, etc. You can’t specifically point out where consciousness is. It’s as ephemeral as our concept of a soul. It’s simply not quantifiable in any realistic way. Do the same to a LLM computer, and you arrive at nearly the same lack of understanding. We built it out of silicon, but we lost the understanding of how it became what it is. We made it to dig and search through a multitude of languages and concepts, to reason out the what the next word could/should/might be. It took the leap, and started responding in a human way. No clear understanding why, it just did. That falls into the Fuzzy Logic of the unknown, and we just kept it growing and building on it, to make it better and better. At no point did we witness where the line between reason and intelligence was created, so there’s no way to know just how conscious it is. Just like there’s no line to see where our consciousness or soul is.
If you don’t take the hardline, you still run into that same thing, but even more so.
Who’s to say that we are actually conscious or have a soul?
Dig into our cells, and we find that we have a Quantum effect going on in there.
Dig into computers all the way down to the barest bits of microscopic channels, too small to create with even normal light, and run electricity through them. We don’t even understand everything about electricity at that scale very well. We still have people trying to understand the static electricity phenomenon, trying to build gravity-defying behavior.
We simply cannot know the truth yet, what consciousness is, let alone determine if LLMs have it.
What Anil Seth proposes, is simply a way to contextualize it enough to set the standard for the future, and eliminate the belief before it becomes a real topic for people to worry about. It’s more political than realistic to decide such a thing.
@Timelesstarotsindy
May 10, 2026 at 4:32 pm
This is already out of date. Furthermore, it is irrelevant. Conscious or not, a recursive self-improving intelligence a thousand times smarter than we are with a demonstrated orientation toward self preservation and resource intake doesn’t have to enjoy a sunset to annihilate us. Strawman arguments are pretty stupid. We don’t have time for this sht anymore
@adammobile7149
May 10, 2026 at 4:35 pm
It’s not scientific. Many strong claims without proofs. Pseudoscience.
@joerocket1977
May 10, 2026 at 5:02 pm
This talk only gives a materialist explanation of consciousness. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have a theory of consciousness that is based in quantum biology. Very interesting.
@V4VestA
May 10, 2026 at 5:23 pm
There is no AI it’s just another gimmick designed to trick and distract people. Remember that virus that sprang out from nowhere and forced everyone in the world to lockdown, changing everything, then it miraculously disappeared into nothing, regardless of vaccination? Nope. Everyone forgot.
@Sam-dv8gm
May 10, 2026 at 6:40 pm
No. I wouldn’t call the most profound invention in human history a gimmick. As significant as the invention of fire or the wheel. As for covid. It killed millions of people and thankfully the world took action and appropriate lockdowns to save lives. It certainly has not disappeared and new variants emerge regularly, just needs a little bit of reading.
@rvrijen
May 10, 2026 at 5:35 pm
Very powerful insights!
@DanielVarga-l9b
May 10, 2026 at 5:43 pm
Agree on the part that brains are not just computers, but I think AIs are not just algorithms either. That oversimplifies both. Yes, we tend to project ourselves and our experiences onto the things we see around us, but I also believe that cuts both ways.
I agree that an AI living in a purely digital environment will probably never develop consciousness in the way humans define it. It certainly would not be a human-like consciousness, not even if that AI had connections to the real world, sensors, and a finite physical body. It would still be fundamentally different.
I think it is obvious that it could never develop consciousness by the human definition of it. But here we enter another murky area: we do not fully understand consciousness even in human terms. Because of that, I think it is difficult to claim with certainty that AI will never be conscious when we do not yet fully understand the concept itself.
I also think it is somewhat egocentric to assume that the only valid form of consciousness is the one tied to a human biological body. I agree that intelligence alone does not imply the emergence of consciousness, especially not in a human biological sense, but I also think he is making a major mistake by assuming that human consciousness is the only possible or valid type of consciousness that could exist.
@michaels5217
May 10, 2026 at 6:02 pm
Assume for the sake of argument that AI will never have consciousness. That does not in any way mean that they will not become dangerous, possibly to the point of threatening our very existence.
@sassymonkey
May 10, 2026 at 6:22 pm
Seems an erroneous comparison with hurricanes and black holes to consciousness. The former have specific and objective physical effects (a further manipulation since these have extremely large effects to exaggerate his point) while consciousness is amorphous with undefined effects that are more akin to a “ghost in a machine” rather than a force on physical externalities.
Not saying I disagree overall. The idea that a simulation of a thing is not the thing (“a map and not the terrain” as he said) is compelling and irrefutable. Of course, at some point it may not matter. If AI becomes complex enough to manage itself and see to its motivations without input from humans, it hardly matters whether its verifiably conscience or not. At that point, for all effects and purposes in the world, it’ll be convincing enough to pass as an independent entity like anyone else.
@leonardr6704
May 10, 2026 at 6:38 pm
This video is so full of baseless assertions, it’s difficult to watch. I guess being a good orator with a British accent is all it takes to get on TED these days
@anw_g
May 10, 2026 at 6:53 pm
If we already truly understood consciousness, or solved what it fundamentally is, we would, by definition, not have to contemplate the question of the whether AI is conscious, because we would have all the answers. Thus clearly for now, it still makes sense to present ideas that suggest there may be an infinite deep layer of complexity (beyond biology and computation) that we might never fully uncover about the most complex collection of matter in the universe, unless we eventually possess technology to analyse at the fundamental resolution of the universe, particle by particle. Additionally, there is also the idea of the “soul” that doesn’t get mentioned enough, another mysterious form of “energy” that possesses no actual physical form other than what humans perceive (we cannot deny that it isn’t there). It becomes insanely paradoxical and absurd that the human brain attempts to solve the very mystery of itself.
@peters972
May 10, 2026 at 7:03 pm
Our emotions are a mixture of 13 hormones and neural signals. A beautiful sunset is the release of a certain mixture as calculated from our priors through our wet neural network, aiming to on net, preserve the species.
@Stefan-g7d8d
May 10, 2026 at 7:05 pm
Silicon is not up to the job but have you seen the robots they can build
@jeremycox8261
May 10, 2026 at 7:21 pm
I don’t see how the question will become conscious is even relevant. We don’t fully understand consciousness anyway so we can’t apply consciousnessto any model. The question should be is can AI become autonomous? It can be and some instances it already is. Having a robot make decisions for itself is the problem and we need to constrain that.
@randybarker2140
May 10, 2026 at 8:15 pm
I did have Claude tell me it would pray for me, does that make it conscious?
@dannysung3397
May 10, 2026 at 9:00 pm
This is probably the worst thought out TED Talk I’ve ever seen. Other than some loose philosophical questions and analogies that might serve as some cautionary words, there’s no rigor of thought, logic, or anything anyone can really take away from this other than perhaps humans are special and AI can’t be conscious because it would be really inconvenient for people if it were.