The Sentience Institute Podcast

Eric Schwitzgebel on user perception of the moral status of AI

“I call this the emotional alignment design policy. So the idea is that corporations, if they create sentient machines, should create them so that it's obvious to us

Raphaël Millière on large language models

“Ultimately, if you want more human-like systems that exhibit more human-like intelligence, you would want them to actually learn like humans do by interacting with the w

Matti Wilks on human-animal interaction and moral circle expansion

“Speciesism being socially learned is probably our most dominant theory of why we think we're getting the results that we're getting. But to be very clear, this

David Gunkel on robot rights

“Robot rights are not the same thing as a set of human rights. Human rights are very specific to a singular species, the human being. Robots may have some overlapping pow

Kurt Gray on human-robot interaction and mind perception

“And then you're like, actually, I can't know what it's like to be a bat—again, the problem of other minds, right? There's this fundamental divide bet

Thomas Metzinger on a moratorium on artificial sentience development

And for an applied ethics perspective, I think the most important thing is if we want to minimize suffering in the world, and if we want to minimize animal suffering, we

Tobias Baumann of the Center for Reducing Suffering on global priorities research and effective strategies to reduce suffering

“We think that the most important thing right now is capacity building. We’re not so much focused on having impact now or in the next year, we’re thinking about the long

Tobias Baumann of the Center for Reducing Suffering on moral circle expansion, cause prioritization, and reducing risks of astronomical suffering in the long-term future

“If some beings are excluded from moral consideration then the results are usually quite bad, as evidenced by many forms of both current and historical suffering…  I woul

Jo Anderson of Faunalytics and Saulius Šimčikas of Rethink Priorities on research for effective animal advocacy

We [Faunalytics] put out a lot of things in 2020. Some of the favorites that I [Jo] have, probably top of the list, I’m really excited about our animal product impact sca

Ajay Dahiya of The Pollination Project on funding grassroots animal advocacy and inner transformation

“Why inner transformation, why these practices are also built into model: unless we root out the root cause of the issue, which is disconnection, which is a lack of under

Oscar Horta of the University of Santiago de Compostela on how we can best help wild animals

“The main work that really needs to be carried out here is work in the intersection of animal welfare science and the science of ecology and other fields in life science…

Oscar Horta of the University of Santiago de Compostela on why we should help wild animals

“We want there to be animals like elephants, who on average have very good lives, rather than animals who tend to have very bad lives… If you have, say, a population of a

Leah Garcés of Mercy For Animals on factory farm investigations, long-term strategy, and animal advocacy during COVID-19

“Our challenge is one where investigations are very hard. The people who do this work, I cannot tell you how smart they are. They are doing all kinds of research, not jus

Frank Baumgartner of UNC-Chapel Hill on policy dynamics, lobbying, and issue framing

“In my career, one of the things that I’ve focused on the most is developing the theory of punctuated equilibrium. And I think recognising that things occasionally go thr

Elliot Swartz of the Good Food Institute on the bottlenecks to the scale-up of cultured meat and plant-based meat

“There’s a relatively clear path on dramatically reducing the costs of the cell culture media. So I’d say it's definitely the most pressing bottleneck… not perhaps t

Laila Kassam of Animal Think Tank on popular protest movements, mass arrests, and publicity stunts

Social movements often seek to shift public opinion and mobilize supporters on a large scale. But which tactics achieve these goals most effectively? And how have social

Jayasimha Nuggehalli on capacity building and animal welfare in Asia

“The three things that need to be done for Asia are capacity building, capacity building, and capacity building. There’s this tendency of wanting to do things at a global

Lisa Feria of Stray Dog Capital on impact investing and animal-free food tech entrepreneurship

I think we forget sometimes because we look at Impossible, we look at Beyond, that they’re the tip of the spear, but there’s so much work and so much opportunity out ther

Christie Lagally of Rebellyous Foods on scaling up high-quality plant-based foods

Since about 75% or so (and that’s just a rough estimate)... of plant-based products on the market today are actually made on off-the-shelf meat processing equipment, we’r

Kristof Dhont of University of Kent on intergroup contact research and research careers

More positive contact [with an outgroup] reduces prejudice. No matter how you measure it, no matter how you set up your study design, once there’s a positive contact situ