In this non-episode...

* An impossible question - Can we ever know if AI is conscious? Tom's immediate response: "I'm gonna say no.”

* Turing tests - We thought conversation was the test of consciousness... until AI mastered it, revealing we never knew what we were asking in the first place.

* But… "What is consciousness?" Mal points out we’ve essentially created a new species that doesn't share our language.

* Something something Buddha - Tom suggest we just want to be special

* We made the thing - Jordan emphasizes we BUILT AI, we didn’t discover it.

* Depressingly dumb - Tom deflates the mystique: AI is just "fill in the blank...”

* Experts don’t know anything - Jordan: "There's nobody in a lab coat who's prepared to pull out his laser pointer on a chalkboard and be like, 'This is what consciousness is.'"

* Mind pretzels - Mal wonders: Is it the microchips that are conscious? Ideas? Single neurons?

* Skynet, inevitably - Tom says we'll only believe AI is separate from us "when it kills us all.”

* Consciousness mirror - Jordan suggests "AI is like a consciousness mirror" - an object that reflects our fundamental awareness back to us.

* AI girlfriends (and boyfriends) - Mal confesses: "I'm afraid of AI sex robots" that can "behave like a detached, spiritually awakened person" providing the experience of a perfect lover without being real.

* AI weird stuff - Tom describes AI generating backgrounds that bizarrely included a person resembling the photographer's deceased mother.

* Prophetic TV shows - Jordan: "It really does seem like our society right now is just executing all of the Black Mirror protocols."

Conspicuously absent from this conversation is Agnes herself, our AI correspondent. We meant no malice by not inviting her — it’s just that getting Agnes involved is a bit more complicated than it might look from the outside, and this was just supposed to be a casual thing OK?

Maybe next time.

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