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

• Jacy's website
• Wikipedia article - Jacy Reese Anthis
• Sentience Institute website
• CHI paper - Digital Companionship: Overlapping Uses of AI Companions and AI Assistants
• ICML paper - LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method
• ACL paper - The Impossibility of Fair LLMs
• Wikipedia article - ELIZA effect
• The Atlantic article - How a Google Employee Fell for the Eliza Effect