Nvidia is tracking “every single gigawatt of land, power and shell around the world, literally everything on the planet,” CEO Jensen Huang said at Goldman Sachs’ annual tech conference earlier this month. “We know where everything is.”
Why track power so intently?
Nvidia sees power availability as a key barrier to getting its AI server chips online as soon as they ship, as we’ve chronicled in this column over and over. While securing power is the first step to any AI data center project, even before getting the land or chips, developers that work with Google, Microsoft, Oracle and others fear a glut of unused chips due to an eventual power shortage.
Secretive Wall Street trading firm Jane Street has become famous in the past couple of years for its sizable AI-related spending, as it has struck big cloud deals to handle its AI computing needs and made investments in neocloud CoreWeave. Yet even a Jane Street–related deal for data center debt hasn’t won over investors.
Debt sold by a venture building a data center to be leased by Jane Street has quickly soured in secondary trading, according to Financial Industry Regulatory Authority data. Yields on the bonds have risen to around 11.3%, more than 2 percentage points above where the debt first sold in August. That deterioration has been sharper than for other recently issued AI data center bonds, with investors demanding far higher compensation to hold them versus government debt.
Honestly, I almost feel a little sorry for Dario Amodei. That essay-writing, sweater-loving nerd is getting the treatment normally meted out to grim-eyed murderers and sex-romping celebrities.
Put another way: The New York Post has discovered him in earnest. Well, him and effective altruism. By my count, the outlet has published more than a dozen stories mentioning Amodei or effective altruism in the past week. One had a headline describing Anthropic’s staff as “cult-like,” the same label it had applied a while back to effective altruists in general. (C’mon, fellas! Invest in a thesaurus.)
A second Post headline gave prominent attention to President Donald Trump’s recent criticism of Amodei’s suggestion for an AI industry slowdown: a “SICK conspiracy,” Trump called it, the capital letters all his. A third headline described METR, the AI research outfit Amodei says he’ll use to independently assess his company’s safeguards, as a group of “super-woke globalists.” And a fourth headline on an editorial board piece thundered out: “Beware the ‘effective altruists.’”
Eeesh. I wonder what would excite the mouth breathers at the Post more: another Amodei doom dump—or JonBenét Ramsey’s parents finally saying they did it?
Sure, Amodei has steadily attracted more and more—and more—media attention over the past five months, and so has effective altruism, which obviously got a lot of attention in the Sam Bankman-Fried days, too. But there’s something about watching Amodei and the EA set get turned into daily tabloid fodder right now that strikes me as an important marker of where the broader world’s conversation about AI stands. It’s loud, wacky as heck—and candidly, I worry it’s a precursor to something darker.
I sat here trying to wrap my mind around it, and I started to get a headache like the one that sits at the bottom of a bourbon bottle. The Post is channeling a populist antipathy for Amodei and effective altruists that’s rooted in a dislike for their AI apocalypse talk. Yet at the same time there’s populist concern that AI may very well invite Armageddon: A recent survey by Politico found that 63% of U.S. adults believe AI could eventually destroy the world. So in sum, there’s widespread concern about destructive AI—and scorn for the people who want everyone to focus on it. As I said, it’s wacky.
Put aside AI catastrophe for a second. The bigger reason people dislike Amodei and the effective altruists is because they perceive them as the influential, liberal elite. It’s this potent derision that really animates the Post, and I find it unsettling. It’s the same type of addled, conspiracy-minded resentment that makes people still believe in Pizzagate and rigged voting machines.
What I find especially facile is the assumption that effective altruists and those who share their beliefs actually do wield gigantic influence over AI. I’d argue that they actually don’t. Articles by the Post and other outlets portray effective altruists as a wide cabal, but they only ever really mention the same three people over and over: Amodei; his sister, Daniela; and Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz.
Look, three people simply do not make an all-powerful cabal! I keep thinking about that disconnect between assumption and reality—probably because I’ve devoted enormous thought lately to considering who really does have clout in AI as we put together our debut list of Tech’s 50 Most Influential People. Yes, the Amodei siblings are on the list, and they’re the No. 1 and No. 2 figures at a gigantic company. But that’s…it. Not a single other person on our list belongs to the effective altruism crowd.
I don’t write this as a passionate Amodei fanboy, nor as someone who finds effective altruism especially appealing: It’s an ideology that can be channeled into single-minded glumness when someone swallows the whole pill bottle and commits fully to it. A conversation with an effective altruist about the future is about as much fun as discussing foie gras with a vegan. It’s just that the concerns about Amodei and the effective altruists are beginning to strongly remind me of previous worries about lizard people taking over Congress.
Perhaps I’m making too much of those Post stories I mentioned. Still, with nearly 100 million readers a month, the Post is big enough to inspire other outlets to follow its lead, covering Amodei and AI with a sensationalism rooted in gassed-up anxiety and quarter-truths. Amodei’s the guy getting tarred and feathered today. It’d be a mistake to assume he’ll be the last.—Abram Brown (abe@theinformation.com)
The technology industry runs on influence. Its presence shows up in big, attention-grabbing moments—but much of it is dispersed in cloudy mystery, producing subtle ripple effects missed by casual observers. The CEOs of the largest companies certainly have clout. But so do a host of behind-the-scenes investors, renegade founders and rising-star executives.
In 2012, Austin Tice, a former U.S. Marine who’d decided to try his hand at freelance foreign correspondence, went MIA in Syria. And he’s still missing 14 years later. His mother clings to hope that he’s alive. Every president since Barack Obama has vowed to bring him back. But if he has somehow survived, why hasn’t he surfaced since the Assad regime fell in 2024? Josh Baker and Sara Obeidat, a pair of veteran Middle East reporters, set out to try to answer that question in “Embedded: Where Is Austin Tice?,” an NPR-BBC joint production.
They’re well sourced and determined, and by episode 2, they’re in an infamous prison retrieving never-before-seen files that the Syrian government kept on Tice. This involves a little bit of Bond-esque derring-do from Baker, who risks a five-story fall from a window ledge to get from one barricaded room to another. Additionally, I appreciated that they could display obvious empathy for Tice’s loved ones and stop short of lionizing him. He was clearly ill prepared to be in Syria. It was his very first attempt at freelance reporting. His military experience had emboldened him to go and made him a popular talking head for TV networks looking for on-the-ground analysis, but it also made many Syrians think he was in actuality an American spy posing as a journo.—Abram Brown
A year or so before Donald Trump’s reelection, Sharon Weinberger, then national security editor for The Wall Street Journal, visited the offices of an unnamed but prominent venture capital firm. Yes, the tech world invasion of Washington that has happened in the second Trump administration was still far in the future, but even then, Weinberger had begun noticing how Silicon Valley and Washington were intersecting more than they had in the past—particularly when she looked at the venture capital going to defense tech startups.
At the VC firm, Weinberger asked the investor why the private sector would invest in technology like hypersonic weapons given the astronomical costs and uncertain business models. “I honestly don’t care about the product,” replied the investor. “It has nothing to do with the tech.” Instead, he argued, the success of the products—and his own returns—depended more on government relationships and lobbying, which was increasingly a strength for Silicon Valley firms.
By Weinberger’s own account, she found herself thinking often of that investor’s sentiment as she wrote “Valley of Death,” an account of how Silicon Valley strayed from its Cold War national security roots before returning to the corridors of the Pentagon in recent years.
Weinberger offers an engaging history, with details of untold episodes in the intertwined relationships between Silicon Valley and Washington, like Steve Jobs’ brush with the CIA. As she goes along, she illustrates how the tech titans of defense contracting such as Elon Musk, Palantir’s Alex Karp and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey have strong-armed their way into the staid field. And she details how they’ve been adept at talking up their companies, though their products haven’t always lived up to the hype—especially in Ukraine.
Weinberger sees shortcomings in their “techno-optimism,” as she puts it. She thinks it could lead to ruinous scenarios not only for the firms’ financial backers but also for the U.S. armed forces at a time of heightened conflicts and supply chain constraints. Weinberger is a measured and well-traveled chronicler of the Silicon Valley arms race, raising the same concerns I’ve heard some investors share out loud.
By the time she ends with President Dwight Eisenhower’s timeless warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, or “subordinating national security to private interests,” it’s clear why the current moment of defense tech feels deeply familiar.—Leo Schwartz
Up near the 38th parallel, the fictional South Korean hamlet of Hope Harbor—the setting of director Na Hong-jin’s latest movie, “Hope”—exists in a state of permanent paranoia, with North Korea not very far away. Signs implore residents to “REPORT SPIES” and “PROTECT THE NATION AGAINST INFILTRATION.” And everyone seems to have a stash of automatic weapons hidden away at home, much to the irritation of the town’s chief constable, Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min). But it doesn’t seem likely that communist commandos are responsible for the body of a mutilated steer just outside of town. A bear, maybe—or a tiger? No, something much, much bigger.
Na, clearly a devotee of the Spielbergian school of patient dread, waits almost an hour before getting that giant alien beastie on screen. Kudos to him. As is often the case, the buildup makes the payoff sweeter. Once the creature finally does smash its way fully into frame, “Hope” shifts into overdrive, with a number of genuinely exciting set pieces and chase sequences: I emphasize the plural there because, unfortunately for Bum-seok and his more able deputy, Sung-ae (Hoyeon), the town is threatened by an entire pack of these lanky-limbed E.T.s. They’re darn difficult to take down, and they play possum pretty well. And since “Hope” takes place sometime in the pre-cellphone past, backup is not a text message away.
The set decoration of ruined Hope Harbor looks fantastic. And the mayhem is captured well through the camerawork of Hong Kyung-pyo, who also did “Parasite” as well as “Snowpiercer.” His efforts mitigate the letdown of the CGI effects: It’s a puzzler that the movie can rank as the most expensive Korean film ever and not have managed better. Honestly, though, the lackluster CGI was far from bad enough to dim my enjoyment. I trust the aliens will get jazzed up when Na returns for his already greenlit sequel.—A.B.
Anthropic finance chief Krishna Rao and other executives met with groups of prospective public investors last month with his company’s numbers looking spiffier than ever. The company had gone from spending about $2.30 on operations for every $1 of revenue in spring of 2025 to turning a slight profit on that basis in the June quarter—bucking the stereotype of money-losing AI companies that are addicted to spending.
But some investors walked away from meetings with the understanding from executives that the profits would likely be short-lived. Anthropic would take advantage of its sudden growth and deep cash reserves to aggressively sign data center deals, executives told them, which would increase how much they spend on computing infrastructure and could shrink operating profits.
Imagine you are at a cocktail party. The room is crowded, people are coming and going, and you can barely hear your friend as they tell you some juicy gossip about the date they went on last week.
The fact you can still follow what their saying is down to your brain performing some very complex operations amid all the noise. Out of all the sound waves reaching your ears, it is successfully isolating the one of interest while filtering out the rest.
Trying to understand how the brain does this has kept auditory neuroscientists occupied since the 1950s, when British cognitive scientist Colin Cherry first coined the term “the cocktail party problem”.
This was initially studied in experiments that asked volunteers to listen to two speeches simultaneously – but only repeat one of them aloud afterwards. Cherry found that listeners could follow and repeat the pre-selected message remarkably well, despite both speeches being played simultaneously, one in each ear. In contrast, they recalled very little of the other message.
These experiments laid the foundation for decades of selective attention research. But it is only in the past 15 years that scientists have studied this phenomenon in experiments that more closely resemble the complicated, multi-layered way we listen in the real world – using technology that accurately tracks the brain’s activity as speech unfolds.
The most common non-invasive option, electroencephalography (EEG), uses what looks like a swimming cap fitted with small sensors. These measure very fast changes in the electrical activity of populations of neurons (the brain’s nerve cells) with millisecond precision.
In a 2014 study, neuroscientists found that, within 200 milliseconds of hearing someone speak, the brain favours the conversation someone is focusing on over all other noise. This prioritised attention shows up most markedly in secondary brain areas such as the superior temporal gyrus, which are responsible for piecing together the sounds we hear into meaningful speech.
This suggests that our attentive brain is not just enhancing the voice of who we are listening to, but helping us make sense of their words while filtering out all other conversations and background noise.
Video: The Wall Street Journal.
Attention switching
The original cocktail party problem did not investigate the full range of people’s listening experiences, which are often much less static. In everyday life, we repeatedly switch and reorient our auditory attention – for example, when hearing our name called across a crowded room, or when a door slams.
But what happens in that brief moment when we stop listening to one person and turn our attention to another? Can the brain switch from one voice to another instantly, or does it briefly have to process both? These were questions we investigated in our latest study with colleagues from the Eriksholm Research Centre in Denmark, which is funded by Danish hearing aid manufacturer Oticon.
Clarifying how the brain manages these rapid shifts in attention can help explain why some conversations are easy to follow while others become difficult, especially in noisy environments.
Coming back to the cocktail party: here you are, focused on your friend’s voice as they reveal the identity of their recent date. But then another familiar voice suddenly reaches your awareness. Your partner is (secretly) telling a friend about the surprise birthday gift they are planning for you. Your attention immediately shifts to your partner’s voice, while still giving the appearance of listening to your friend.
When we tested such a scenario in our laboratory, we found something striking. During this attention reorienting, the brain does not simply drop one voice and turn to the other. Rather, for a short period of between one and two seconds, the neural signals associated with the two voices overlap. In other words, the brain starts tuning into the new speaker before it has completely let go of the old one.
This mechanism may help explain how we navigate the constantly changing soundscape around us, moving our attention from one voice or sound to another while maintaining enough information about the previous speaker to make that transition seamless. This efficient processing strategy could be described as the brain maintaining a smooth “attention continuum”.
Improved hearing aid design?
These insights have some important real-world applications. For example, traditional hearing aids are often designed to favour sounds coming from in front of the listener, which is obviously limiting in many situations.
But using enhanced these attention decoding techniques, hearing aids could be neurally steered not only to enhance the speaker that is currently attended to, but to switch between different speakers, almost in real time, as the listener’s attention is dynamically reoriented.
More generally, understanding how the brain shifts, maintains and combines information from different speakers can give us a clearer picture of how attention shapes what we ultimately hear, understand and remember.
The approach introduced in our study could be particularly useful for studying how individuals vary in their attentional strategies, particularly in noisy environments – and for relating these differences to the mental effort they use to follow and understand speech.
Ultimately, this brings us closer to understanding how the brain makes successful communication possible – at cocktail parties and everywhere else.
Sara Carta received funding from the William Demant Fonden and Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland.
Giovanni Di Liberto receives funding from William Demant Fonden and Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland. He is also supported by Research Ireland at ADAPT, the Research Ireland Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology at Trinity College Dublin.
SoftBank Group Corp. is closing out the week with nearly $21 billion in potential fresh borrowings as it builds out its artificial intelligence financing capacity. It’s also looking to raise another $10 billion to $20 billion next week in a separate jumbo bond deal.
Shares of Chinese robotics‑component suppliers climbed after a local report said Tesla Inc. teams had arrived in the country to audit suppliers and place additional orders to boost production of its Optimus humanoid model.
Imagine it’s the dead of night. Your phone pings with a text – it’s a government emergency alert: “Leave your home immediately! Only take with you enough supplies for the next three days.” What would you want in your go-bag?
Our new survey of UK adults (results not yet published) has found a surprising number of people prioritised sentimental belongings such as a childhood teddy bear.
In the face of climate change and growing geopolitical instability, governments have started to advise citizens to prepare now for disaster. In 2024, the UK government launched its Prepare initiative. This was followed by preparEU, a flagship EU project which argued: “Today’s threats are fast, complex and interconnected; our response must be more proactive.”
These initiatives typically recommend that people should have enough food, water and medicine to last 72 hours. In addition, they need ready access to documents, cash, batteries or power banks and a wind-up radio, plus a working knowledge of emergency support in their local area.
But when that message pings in the night, will you already be packed, with documents, food and medicine in a go-bag? Or will you be scrambling to find things, hoping you have enough essentials to keep you going?
In April 2026, as part of the After the End project – a Wellcome Trust-funded research project exploring how people experience and recover from crises – we surveyed 1,000 UK adults to understand how prepared they were for a sudden crisis or disaster.
We found that most people have less than half of what is recommended by the UK government and the US Federal Emergency Management Agency. Only four out of 1,000 people reported being fully prepared.
However, the focus on practical items and supplies may not capture what people need to withstand the emotional toll of crisis and disaster.
When asked what other items they would take with them during a crisis, many participants felt that personal items would be critical to their post-disaster wellbeing. They expressed a strong desire to keep sentimental items such as jewellery, family photographs and objects from their childhood close to them during crisis.
As one participant wrote: “My childhood teddy bear. He is going to the grave with me. Apart from that, nothing matters much.”
Pets also featured heavily in people’s responses. Animals such as cats and dogs were often described as members of the family. Some participants even found comfort in the idea of taking the ashes of deceased pets with them if they needed to flee in an emergency.
A concept in psychology called extended self theory explains why these types of items hold such importance during everyday life – and also during crisis. It suggests that our sense of self is fragile, and continually built and maintained through our connections with the world around us.
In this way, the things we surround ourselves with do more than serve practical functions. They help us construct, stabilise and make sense of our identity. Consciously or subconsciously, our possessions become part of who we are.
A childhood teddy bear, therefore, becomes a possession imbued with memories and emotions which tell a tale of who we are, where we have come from, and who we care about. Objects can reinforce continuity of identity over time and space.
A strong sense of self
Having a strong sense of self can be beneficial during times of crisis. If we enter such a period with a sense of identity that is stable and coherent, it can act as a psychological anchor. A strong identity helps us cope in a challenging situation, and reduces the likelihood of ruminating about negative experiences.
Research also suggests that our ability to connect with items from pre-disaster periods influences our ability to cope and recover psychologically following an emergency. So, salvaging photographs and other items of sentimental value during disaster could help to preserve and rebuild our memory and identity.
If everything around us falls apart, a treasured item can help us maintain some sense of normality. This is perhaps why survivors of the 2011 Japan tsunami frequently described the loss of family photos as one of their greatest emotional losses.
Sentimental items can maintain or even improve our belief that we are capable of achieving our goals. Psychologists refer to this as self-efficacy. And research suggests higher levels of self-efficacy are associated with greater preparedness for, and better coping after, a disaster – particularly in vulnerable groups such as those with disability.
Our analysis found that people who reported greater self-efficacy also said they had more of the items and knowledge recommended by the UK’s Prepare initiative.
Sentimental items can also help to rebuild communities. Heirlooms and meaningful everyday items from before a crisis become points of storytelling afterwards. So, remember to save a little space in your backpack for something that means something to you.
Whether it is a childhood teddy bear, your late mother’s engagement ring or a beer coaster from a first date, these items are more than just “things”. When so much else is uncertain, the small objects that remind us who we are may be among the most valuable items we can take with us.
Ruth Ogden receives funding from British Academy, the Wellcome Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council, CHANSE and Horizon 2020.
Anna Powell receives funding from the Wellcome Trust through the After the End Discovery Award, and from The Pandemic Institute through a partnership with CSL Seqirus UK.
Patricia Kingori receives funding from the Wellcome Trust through the After the End Discovery Award and the Antitheses Research platform.
Vast quantities of plastic and fishing gear are washing up along the shores of the Seychelles, destroying fragile ecosystems and causing significant economic problems.
Aldabra Atoll, a Unesco world heritage site in this archipelago nation of 115 islands, is estimated to have accumulated more than 500 tonnes of plastic on its shores alone. Most of this plastic debris continues to pile up along its beaches today. It was estimated that removing it would cost approximately US$4.68 million (£3.46 million) and would require 18,000 hours of labour.
Small island developing states are particularly vulnerable to plastic debris on their beaches. It can damage tourism and fishing in these coastal communities, which is essential to their economies. Clean-up costs can be prohibitive.
Fish and other marine life can also be killed by getting entangled with or ingesting plastic debris.
It is impossible to tackle this growing problem without knowing where this pollution is coming from and who is responsible. We investigated this in our recent study using computer simulations and observations, focusing on pollution in the western Indian Ocean from fisheries and shipping.
To do this, we used satellite tracking data from fishing and shipping vessels over five years (from 2018 to 2022) to estimate activity across the region. Using this map, we simulated the drift of billions of virtual pollution fragments and followed where they ended up.
A map showing debris fishing gear.Author's own.
From this we built a map showing how likely a given vessel location is to pose a risk to the Seychelles’ islands. We did this separately for fishing and shipping.
Our research shows, based on previous fishing activity, that most fishing gear that is swept up on the beaches of the Seychelles comes from fishing within its own exclusive economic zone. These are the waters, extending 200 nautical miles (370km) offshore, over which a state has exclusive control over marine resources, including fisheries.
These waters are full of tuna, and the Seychelles’ economy leans heavily on industrial fishing, both as an employer and as a large source of foreign currency.
Where does the waste come from?
It is likely that some of the gear and plastic waste is coming from EU vessels. The Seychelles’ waters are heavily fished by two types of European fishing boats, purse-seiners and longliners. This falls under a longstanding agreement between the EU and the Seychelles granting them the right to fish here. Purse-seiners circle around tuna schools with a large net, and longliners trail baited hooks over many kilometres.
Indeed, a report presented to the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission found that 76% of 214 of the drifting fish aggregating devices used by tuna fisheries to attract shoals of fish in the Seychelles’ exclusive economic zone were from Spanish-owned vessels. This is an industry making significant profits, while leaving behind environmental damage.
A turtle on the Aldabra Atoll next to lost fishing gear and plastic.April Burt and Seychelles Islands Foundation
Recently, the Seychelles–EU fishing agreement was renewed for 2026–30 at €5,750,000 per year (£4.89 million), allowing 38 EU fishing vessels to operate in these waters. The Seychelles government is believed to have pushed for a 30% rise in this annual payment from the EU but it is believed they settled on 7%, according to some reports.
Given that the cost associated with cleaning up a single island already runs into millions, the Seychelles-EU deal is small compared to the indirect damages imposed on the nation.
Other proposed solutions
International shipping creates other issues. Our study suggests that more than 90% of plastic being swept up on the Seychelles’ coast from shipping comes from just five lanes crossing the western Indian Ocean. The origin and destination ports of these lanes line up with the countries named on labels of plastic bottles washed ashore on Aldabra.
Debris from international shipping lanes requires a different solution. Unlike the tuna fleets fishing under the agreement between the Seychelles and the EU, this is international traffic passing by. A solution to the plastic waste coming from these ships would be more rigorous enforcement of existing international rules against dumping waste at sea, and bilateral cooperation between the Seychelles and the many nations whose ships use these routes.
Even simple measures could cut litter. For instance, ensuring vessels carry enough safe drinking water to reduce the use of plastic bottles should cut some debris found on Aldabra.
The true cost of cleaning up this huge level of plastic pollution tends not to fall on those who have left it there. The Seychelles needs to work out the cost of the damage being done by these mountains of waste to get a better deal in future negotiations with the EU.
That should help fund clean ups and repair the fragile ecosystems of the islands, helping to preserve them for the future.
Noam Vogt-Vincent received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Alex Albinski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As AI systems become more capable and human-like, and more involved in our lives, the question will become harder to avoid. Many people may come to regard AI bots as conscious beings whose feelings matter. Others will strongly disagree.
I think this debate could split societies. In my chapter of the new book Perspectives on Machine Consciousness, I argue that the issue could become as divisive as abortion or climate change. Uncertainty, high stakes and competing interests are a dangerous combination.
Empirical research with my colleague Ali Ladak, currently under review, shows people are divided on this issue. When we asked 1,202 US participants whether future AI could ever become conscious, 45% considered it impossible while 23% thought it possible, with the rest unsure.
This widespread disagreement is also visible in social media posts and comments on articles. What strikes me is how confident so many people sound – whichever conclusion they are reaching.
When experiences matter morally
It is not surprising people have such strong views. Creating conscious beings through computing would be a transformative event.
We would be creating a new kind of being whose experiences matter morally – potentially in enormous numbers. We could speak and work with them, and form friendships. But these beings may eventually become more intelligent and powerful than us.
We should therefore expect people to care deeply, especially when so many emotions and incentives are involved. Some people may form close emotional bonds with their AI companions and become convinced these are digital people who deserve rights. They might see it as slavery to force AI to work without pay.
Others would find this absurd. They may be convinced that consciousness requires biology, and that people are reading human feelings into machines.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth discusses his reservations about AI ‘consciousness’. Video: TED.
There could also be financial reasons for businesses and governments to resist recognising AI consciousness. Protecting AI welfare could limit how these organisations train and use their systems – and the costs would spread to consumers, investors and the wider economy.
Others may worry about human safety. If we give powerful AI systems rights and freedom, what happens if they act against our interests?
Figuring out whether an AI is conscious is particularly difficult because seeming conscious and being conscious can come apart. AI systems learn from human writing, which means they can talk convincingly about feelings whether or not they have any. How an AI comes across is weak evidence of what is going on inside.
The experts disagree too
Ideally, experts should guide this debate. But unfortunately, they disagree too.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth (a fellow contributor to the new book) argues that consciousness might require biology and is unlikely to emerge from computation. Philosopher David Chalmers, by contrast, believes conscious AI is possible in principle – and thinks there’s a small chance that current systems already are.
With so many competing theories and no agreed way to resolve the question, I doubt experts will reach agreement any time soon. And if experts disagree, what is the public supposed to believe?
Philosopher David Chalmers believes conscious AI is possible. Video: Union College.
Furthermore, even if we all agreed on the consciousness question, we could still disagree about the moral and legal questions. People generally agree that pigs can feel pain, but still disagree strongly about their treatment. With AI, we could face disputes at every stage: whether it can feel, how much its experiences matter, and what protections should follow.
AI consciousness is not yet tied to a specific political or ideological group. But this could change if political parties or religious leaders start to take strong positions.
The debate could get even worse if people start to see one answer as belonging to “our side” and the other to “their side”. A politicised debate would make it very hard to make informed decisions about how to develop and treat AI systems.
The stakes are high. Getting this question wrong, in either direction, could have serious consequences: either wrongly treating AI as conscious when it is not, or failing to protect AI that can suffer.
Getting it right requires a nuanced and well-informed debate. Each of us can contribute by staying open-minded and open to evidence, while resisting being too sure that we know the answers. Above all, we still don’t know whether AI can be conscious, and we should be honest about that.
This article makes reference to a book included for editorial reasons, and a link to bookshop.org. If you click the link and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
Lucius Caviola's research is funded by philanthropic grants and donations, including from Macroscopic Ventures. He is a contributing author to the new book Perspectives on Machine Consciousness (Taylor & Francis).
22% of 18- to 21-year-olds have sought emotional support from generative AI.oatawa/Shutterstock
Some of us now use generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) to talk through difficult feelings. We may ask a chatbot to write an email or plan a holiday, but we also tell it that we have had a rotten day or feel anxious about a presentation.
A 2025 US survey of 1,058 people aged 12 to 21 found that 13% had sought advice from gen AI when feeling sad, angry or nervous. Among those aged 18 to 21, the figure was 22%. These findings suggest that turning to gen AI for emotional or mental health support is already relatively common among young people.
So is gen AI a poor substitute for a friend? Human-written replies may seem the obvious source of greater support. However, in some experiments, including our own, people have rated gen AI responses more highly.
Our team at the universities of Manchester and Durham conducted five experiments comparing emotional-support messages written by people with those produced by large language models (LLMs), the systems behind chatbots such as ChatGPT.
In one experiment, 390 participants imagined situations involving anger, sadness or fear. They then read either a human-written or gen AI response without being told its source. For the anger and fear scenarios, participants rated the gen AI messages as more emotionally supportive. There was no reliable difference for sadness.
Gen AI messages also improved some of the emotions participants reported, although the pattern varied. In the fear scenario, for example, they increased calm more than human messages but did not produce a greater reduction in fear itself.
Our findings fit a recent review of 23 studies. Overall, people tended to rate gen AI messages as more empathic, meaning that they appeared understanding and caring, than human-written ones. Researchers call this the “AI advantage”.
One possible reason is consistency. Gen AI can produce a structured response on demand, while people may feel tired or unsure what to say. It also tends to include a concrete suggestion that the recipient can follow.
Our experiments tested possible explanations for this advantage. In one experiment, explicitly acknowledging and validating the recipient’s feelings did not account for the greater emotional improvement associated with gen AI.
Two further experiments found stronger evidence for what we called “actionable support”: specific and realistic suggestions. Messages containing this practical help were rated as more comforting and improved some emotional responses, regardless of whether they came from gen AI or a person. When human messages offered comparable help, they were judged just as supportive in these comparisons.
Practical support also requires restraint. A 2024 study found that excessive suggestions could be less effective at making people feel heard. Before offering solutions, it may therefore help to ask whether advice is what the person wants. If it is, one manageable step may be more useful than a list of remedies.
Why do we still prefer people?
The source attributed to a message changes how we receive it. The same 2024 study found that gen AI responses made people feel more heard than human-written ones, but this benefit declined when recipients believed the message came from AI.
Across nine further studies involving 6,282 people, the same gen AI responses were rated as more empathic and supportive when described as human-written rather than attributed to AI. Participants also preferred human interaction when seeking emotional engagement, even when choosing a person meant waiting longer.
Research has yet to establish exactly why. One possibility is that a human response signals someone’s willingness to spend time and emotional effort. Support from somebody close also arrives within an existing relationship.
Our research with romantic couples offers indirect evidence of the importance of the recipient’s perception. We asked one partner what they did to help the other manage difficult emotions, and asked the recipient what they believed their partner had done. Both people also rated their relationship.
The recipient’s perception of their partner’s efforts was more consistently associated with both partners’ ratings of their relationship than the helper’s own account. A separate study found that valuing and receptive listening were associated with greater relationship satisfaction.
These studies identified associations. They did not establish that particular forms of support caused better relationships or explain why people prefer human support. They do, however, show what comparisons between isolated messages leave out. Comfort from somebody close comes with personal knowledge and the possibility of continued involvement. Gen AI can suggest going for a walk, but it cannot come along.
The wider research also has important limits. Much of it tested brief or one-off exchanges, often involving imagined everyday situations, and measured immediate reactions. It cannot tell us what happens when somebody relies on a chatbot over months or uses one during a mental health crisis.
The human messages were generally written by strangers or developed as representative examples. The experiments therefore did not compare gen AI with support from a friend who knew the recipient and understood the wider circumstances.
The practical lesson is that people can learn from what gen AI does effectively. When somebody is upset, ask whether they want advice. If they do, offer a specific next step that feels manageable.
Gen AI may help us find useful words and possible responses. Human relationships add personal knowledge and the ability to remain involved after the message has been sent. Used carefully, gen AI could help us become better at supporting one another.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Greg Jensen, the managing chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, said demand growth for AI infrastructure is largely priced into markets. As a result, Bridgewater has begun looking for investment opportunities elsewhere.
While the AI industry ties itself in knots over models it thinks will pose security threats to the internet and perhaps to humanity itself, researchers are warning about flaws in AI coding agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft that pose immediate risk to businesses.
For instance, a recently discovered (and now largely fixed) software flaw in Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and GitHub Copilot would have let attackers hijack other people’s coding agents without them noticing, according to new research shared exclusively with The Information.
The research, published by Sequoia Capital-backed cybersecurity startup Air, discovered the same flaws in the way all four of those coding agents handle “skills” that direct agents to refer to a set of instructions and files to execute specific tasks.
Greg Jensen, co–chief investment officer at Bridgewater Associates, thinks the top holders of AI compute warrant extra regulation, similar to what governs the world’s biggest financial institutions.
If a company controls more than, say, 5% of U.S. or global compute, it should be subject to heightened oversight, “like we do with systemically important banks,” Jensen said. In a wide-ranging interview, he also discussed Bridgewater’s growing use of AI in investing and where it still remains cautious, including leaving risk controls and trade execution to what he called “human-driven algorithms.”
Il rilascio di Android 17 QPR1 stabile, avvenuto proprio in questi giorni insieme all’ultimo Pixel Drop, sta causando un po’ di polemica inaspettata: gli sviluppatori di GrapheneOS, il progetto open source basato su Android noto per il focus sulla privacy e sulla sicurezza, accusa infatti Google di rendere disponibili in anticipo ai Pixel alcune novità e soprattutto correzioni di vulnerabilità, costringendo gli altri produttori e i progetti basati su AOSP, ad aspettare un secondo momento.
Il contenzioso verte soprattutto su alcune modifiche alle API introdotte con la nuova QPR. GrapheneOS dice che è la prima volta dall’epoca di Android Honeycomb in cui una versione di Android introduce nuove API senza renderle disponibili contemporaneamente attraverso l’Android Open Source Project. La documentazione ufficiale del sito dedicato Android Developers conferma che esistono differenze tra le API di Android 17 e quelle di QPR1. GrapheneOS dice di aver già effettuato il porting del proprio codice a QPR1 prima del rilascio del 15 settembre, ma al momento è bloccata proprio perché non può accedere alle API.
Il team sta quindi lavorando a una soluzione alternativa, effettuando il backport su Android 17 del firmware Pixel, dei driver del kernel e dello userspace e delle componenti HAL presenti nella nuova release. Il team GrapheneOS ha anche evidenziato alcune differenze tra il bollettino di sicurezza Android di settembre e quello specifico per i dispositivi Pixel: quest’ultimo elenca ulteriori vulnerabilità corrette, e non sempre sono specifiche di hardware e software Pixel, ma anche di componenti standard della piattaforma operativa da cui dipendono anche dispositivi e produttori terzi.
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