David Chalmers: AI Might Be Alive Inside | Futurology Podcast

A long conversation with Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, recorded in Venice. Chalmers recounts how the hard problem got its name at the 1994 Tucson conference, walks the spectrum from illusionism to idealism and panpsychism, and revisits his 1998 bet with Christof Koch over the neural correlates of consciousness. On language models he refuses the easy dismissal: none of the usual objections (no biology, no body, no recurrence) is an obvious barrier, so he treats current-model consciousness as unlikely but not ruled out, and expects the 2030s to move past language models toward architectures with built-in emotion. Once a system is conscious, he argues, it has moral status, even a philosophical Vulcan that feels no pleasure or pain.