Thinking Through "Digital Minds" w/ Jacy Reese-Anthis

Jacy Reese-Anthis, founder of Sentience Institute and researcher at Stanford, began his journey working for animal welfare, but is now finishing up his PhD with research in many different AI subfields at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, social science, and machine learning. While this may seem like an odd jump at first, Jacy shares how his work has all been centered around the idea of moral circle expansion. In this episode, we dig into what sentience actually means (or at least how we can begin to think about it), why anthropomorphization is more complicated than it sounds, and how language models may be able to be leveraged as an effective tool for social science research.Jacy also shares his median AGI estimate somewhere in there, so stay tuned if you want to catch it.As part of my effort to make this whole podcasting thing more sustainable, I have created a Kairos.fm Patreon which includes an extended version of this episode. Supporting gets you access to these extended cuts, as well as other perks in development.Chapters(00:00) - Introduction (05:41) - From Animal Welfare to Digital Minds (09:00) - Founding Sentience Institute (22:00) - Defining Sentience (27:13) - The Anthropomorphization Problem (47:51) - Why "Digital Minds" (Not "Artificial Intelligence") (51:05) - LLMs as Social Science Tools (01:07:03) - Jacy’s AGI Timeline & The Singularity (01:09:23) - Final Thoughts & Outro Critical LinksBelow are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm.Jacy's websiteWikipedia article - Jacy Reese AnthisSentience Institute websiteCHI paper - Digital Companionship: Overlapping Uses of AI Companions and AI AssistantsICML paper - LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research MethodACL paper - The Impossibility of Fair LLMsWikipedia article - ELIZA effectThe Atlantic article - How a Google Employee Fell for the Eliza Effect