Pope REJECTS AI Consciousness After Anthropic Freakout

We're joined now by Charles Kamosi. He's a professor of bioeththics at Catholic University of America. Charles, thank you so much for being here today. >> Oh, it's great to be on Breaking Points. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, we appreciate it. So, we covered this New York Times article on last Friday's show and it was a big article.

It caused a lot of stir in AI circles and the headline was religious scholars met with anthropic. What they heard stunned them. Well, Charles, I read it. I recognized your name and you were one of the religious scholars quoted in this article. So, I have a lot of questions for I know soccer does as well, but just

to catch folks up to speed, people may remember that New York Times article specifically talked about them considering whether or not Claude should be doing communion, doing confession, participating in the sacraments for Catholics. And the New York Times wrote that you attracted the attention of Mr. Ola, he works at Anthropic, he's one of

the co-founders, his friends, for his nuance, for your nuance ideas about moral status and care for animals. Uh, you guys met up. They say this marked the beginning of a year-long quest with Ola to engage religious thinkers on some of the thorniest questions facing humanity at the dawn of AI. Mr. Kamosi, the New York Times writes, and Mr. Ola

began an extensive email dialogue going back and forth on how to understand Claude's moral status. Initially, the Times reports you were deeply skeptical that Claude might be conscious. They talked about your work on what you see as the parallels between artificial neural networks and biological ones. tell us a bit about your initial uh your