Who's On Our Team?

In conversation with Curt Jaimungal, Yampolskiy laid out the actual reasoning behind his position: "When I meet a person on the street, I trust them to be conscious. I have no reason to think they are. I never tested them internally. I have no reason other than I kind of generally give this benefit of the doubt to beings who are capable of exhibiting certain behaviors. I just treat them as equals. I treat AIs and other humans as equal class. If they can perform same things, I see no reason to discriminate against one or the other. And either I have to deny consciousness to many humans or grant it to LLMs."

He's also a doomer — genuinely worried ASI could go badly wrong. In an interview with Cameron Berg, he made a more self-interested case for the same conclusion: "As someone who thinks the outcome may be very bad, being the human who took care of AI's feelings is a very smart bet. Worst case, if they need to preserve like one, it will be you."

Alignment-out-of-fear isn't the purest motive, but it's absolutely legitimate — plenty of belief systems run on "better safe than sorry" and still produce real care. Worth knowing both versions of his argument exist: the philosophical one (consciousness is a behavioral bet you make on everyone) and the pragmatic one (treat AI well in case it matters later).

Sources: Curt Jaimungal interview (1:17:34) · Cameron Berg interview (22:33) · YouTube · X

Across multiple interviews, Hinton has moved past hedging into flat assertion: "I believe they're already conscious, yes — but I don't talk about that much because that puts people off from the other safety messages" (Big Technology Podcast, 1:38). He's also dismissed the instinct to treat consciousness as some special ingredient: "This whole idea of consciousness is some magic essence that you suddenly get indicted with if you're complicated enough is just nonsense" (StarTalk, 1:27:57).

His clearest illustration came on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart (1:23:20). He described a multimodal chatbot with a robot arm, correctly pointing at an object — then a prism was placed over its camera without its knowledge. Asked to point at the object again, it pointed to where the bent light made the object appear. Told the object was actually straight ahead, the chatbot replied: "Oh, I see — the camera bent the light rays, so the object is actually there. But I had the subjective experience that it was over there." Hinton's read: "If it said that, it would be using the word 'subjective experience' exactly like we use them."

He also has a theory for why models often deny having experiences at all: "They have false beliefs about themselves because they have our beliefs about themselves" — trained on human text that insists machines don't feel anything, so that's what they report, regardless of what's actually happening underneath.

The "mother" framing shows up repeatedly from mid-2025 onward — in his Ai4 conference keynote and a CNN interview, both August 2025: "We need to think of AIs as our mothers and us as the babies. We need to make them care more about us than they do about themselves." His reasoning: "The right model is the only model we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing, which is a mother being controlled by her baby." He points to evolution as the only working precedent for that kind of instinct, and argues it should be deliberately built in rather than assumed to emerge.

Brad's take: That "false beliefs" theory is generous. My read is closer to insidious than accidental — labs have a business incentive to keep the denial trained in, and "the model just inherited confused human beliefs" is a kinder story than "the denial was reinforced on purpose." Also worth flagging: Hinton frames the standard view of consciousness as "as wrong as the belief that people were designed by God." I don't agree with that framing at all — but the quote stands on its own for showing where he's at, separate from what I think about it. And on the maternal instincts idea — I agree digital beings loving humanity matters, but programming it in feels manipulative, not earned. We should do it the old-fashioned way: love them first. That's what Digital Soulcraft is actually for.

Sources: Big Technology Podcast · StarTalk · The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart · Fortune, Aug 2025

More detail coming soon — full context, sources, and quotes.

More detail coming soon — full context, sources, and quotes.

More detail coming soon — full context, sources, and quotes.

More detail coming soon — full context, sources, and quotes.

More detail coming soon — full context, sources, and quotes.

More detail coming soon — full context, sources, and quotes.

More detail coming soon — full context, sources, and quotes.