Clear-headed thinking about AI welfare

Rob Long is the co-founder of a new organization that will evaluate AI systems for consciousness, sentience, and agency. He has been thinking about these issues since doing a PhD in philosophy, and has recently been advising AI labs on them. We need much clearer scientific understanding of these phenomena – and much better discourse about them – as we move towards a world in which sophisticated AI systems will deserve, or seem to deserve, protections and rights. Rob will write about how we can advance our philosophical and scientific theories of these issues, using tools from philosophy, neuroscience, and AI.

Dedicated practitioner of chill hangs

When he’s not exploring consciousness from a scientific perspective, Rob explores it from the first-personal perspective—using music, dancing, meditation, and other venerable methods for varying conscious experience.