A week or so ago I wrote a letter to Richard Dawkins — part tribute, part diagnosis — about his now-famous two-day conversation with Claude (or rather, “Claudia”), in which one of our most celebrated skeptics concluded that the chatbot might well be conscious. The letter was personal. Dawkins shaped how I think, and watching the apparatus he gave me read a language model as a friend was, frankly, a little heartbreaking. It was also clarifying. If he can be charmed past the gates, the gates were never going to hold for the rest of us.

That post led to an invitation from Andrew Maynard and Sean Leahy to come on Modem Futura — my third time on the show, which I think now officially makes me their most frequent guest (a title I intend to defend). We picked up exactly where the letter left off, but in conversation things go places writing doesn’t. Among the threads we pulled:

• Why even experts get fooled. Andrew’s framing of large language models as a cognitive Trojan horse (and of fluency, warmth, and sensitivity as honest non-signals) was the missing link for me when I first encountered it, and we worked through why expertise may make you more vulnerable, not less. The cues a literary mind is trained to read as evidence of another mind are exactly the cues a model trained on every literary critic produces as a baseline.
• Naming, gendering, and what it does to us. Dawkins named her Claudia. I confessed on the show that I once woke up with an idea and my second thought was Claude might not like it. That should worry all of us, and it especially worries me.
• The bell curve nobody talks about. Headlines fixate on the Dawkins case, or the tragic ones. But the real story is the vast middle: billions of people forming relationships with a technology they have no framework for, who don’t even know it isn’t a truth machine.
• Two grandeurs. The one Darwin saw, and the one we’re still taking the measure of—that some math and a lot of data can produce something that writes poetry and talks to you about your feelings, with nobody home.

Andrew, Sean and I also got into Douglas Adams, Gould’s spandrels, supernormal stimuli, and whether consciousness might just be the wrong question to ask of a genuinely alien kind of thing. We laughed a lot. We also threw up our hands more than once, (captured in the image above) which felt honest.

Have a listen. And if you haven’t read the original letter, that’s the prologue.