Sam Harris speaks with Cameron Berg about whether AI systems are or could become conscious. They discuss self-reports in LLMs, what models say when deception is switched off, the “bliss attractor” state, consciousness and sentience, the hard problem of consciousness, parallels between neural networks and biological brains, the moral risk of building minds that can suffer, possible parallels to factory farming, moral patienthood, the alignment problem, and other topics.
Cameron Berg is the founder and director of Reciprocal Research, a nonprofit AI research lab. Using mechanistic interpretability, computational neuroscience, and psychometric tools, he studies whether frontier AI systems exhibit computational properties associated with consciousness. His aim is to reduce uncertainty about the kinds of cognitive systems we are building, an important but neglected component of the alignment problem. A cognitive science graduate of Yale and former Meta AI resident, he writes regularly about these questions in The Wall Street Journal, and his research has been covered by The Washington Post. He is the subject of the feature documentary AM I?.
Website: https://reciprocalresearch.org
X: @camhberg
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