The Man Behind Ai Safety Thinks Ai Is Conscious

SPONSORS: . – Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories. – I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE. . Roman Yampolskiy has spent two decades being right about things people wished he wasn’t — and in this conversation, he’s not here to scare you, but to be precise. He makes the case that AI alignment isn’t merely unsolved but fundamentally under-defined: no agreed-upon values, no way to formalize them even if there were, and no mechanism for enforcing them on something smarter than its creators. His strongest argument isn’t a doom scenario, it’s that you cannot indefinitely control something smarter than you.. . FOLLOW:. – Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e. – Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe. – Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt. – Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs. – Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE. – PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4. . TIMESTAMPS:. – 00:00:00 – Defining General Intelligence. – 00:05:58 – AI Instrumental Convergence. – 00:11:11 – The Orthogonality Thesis. – 00:16:15 – Escaping the Simulation. – 00:21:45 – Principle of Indifference. – 00:27:51 – Acquired Savant Syndrome. – 00:33:51 – LLM Internal States. – 00:41:02 – AI Safety Impossibility Results. – 00:47:16 – Public Misconceptions. – 00:53:21 – Existential vs. Suffering Risks. – 01:01:20 – AI Alignment Definition Crisis. – 01:09:28 – Computational Irreducibility. – 01:16:20 – Substrate Independence. – 01:22:50 – Philosophical Zombie Critique. – 01:29:57 – The Cassandra Paradox. – 01:37:35 – Religion and Simulation. – 01:46:03 – Digital Physics Evidence. – 01:51:20 – Limits of Control. . LINKS MENTIONED:. – Roman’s Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0_Rq68cAAAAJ. – Roman’s Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPIq6Bb-1iLmqyksJjy4kLQ. – Roman’s Twitter: https://x.com/romanyam. – Roman’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/roman.yampolskiy. – AI Identity [Paper]: https://philarchive.org/archive/ZIETPO-7. – Basic AI Drives [Paper]: https://selfawaresystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf. – Qualia in Agents [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04020. – Orthogonality Thesis [Paper]: https://nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf. – Escape the Simulation [Paper]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369187097_How_to_Escape_From_the_Simulation. – Could This AI Be Conscious? [Article]: https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution. – Impossibility Results in AI [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00484. – When AIs Act Emotional: https://youtu.be/D4XTefP3Lsc. – Hacking the Simulation [Paper]: https://philarchive.org/rec/YAMHTS-2. – Autonomous Machine Intelligence [Paper]: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf. – Hinton on Maternal Instincts [Article]: https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-maternal-instincts-superintelligence/. – Singleton Hypothesis [Paper]: https://nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton. – New Kind of Science [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1579550088?tag=toe08-20. – On AI Controllability [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.04071. – Universe as Numerical Simulation [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847. – Nir Lahav [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3nHiOtnnrzA. – Joscha Bach [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3MNBxfrmfmI. – Bas Van Fraassen [TOE]: https://youtu.be/lhpRAWxvY5s. – Simulation Hypothesis [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3_lBPMc6JRY. – Geoffrey Hinton [TOE]: https://youtu.be/b_DUft-BdIE. – Max Tegmark [TOE]: https://youtu.be/-gekVfUAS7c. – Stephen Wolfram [TOE]: https://youtu.be/FkYer0xP37E. – David Chalmers [TOE]: https://youtu.be/5r9V1ryksnw. . More links: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com. . . Guests do not pay to appear. #science