Conspicuous Cognition Podcast

A podcast about big questions in philosophy, psychology, evolution, politics, artificial intelligence, and more. www.conspicuouscognition.com

Conspicuous Cognition Podcast is a society podcast hosted by Dan Williams, with 19 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Dan Williams hosts Conspicuous Cognition Podcast, a society show with 19 episodes published.

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  Conspicuous Cognition Podcast

  Academics Must Wake Up on AI (with Alexander Kustov)

  Jun 2, 20261h 9mS0

  <p>The political scientist Alexander Kustov recently published a Substack post with a provocative claim: that AI can already do social science research better than most professors. The post went viral. It attracted more than a million views and over a thousand responses, many of them very angry. (Some people even demanded that Alex’s university fire him.)</p><p>In this conversation, we talk about this controversy and the claims that triggered it, including:</p><p>* What agentic AI tools like Claude Code and Codex can already do for research, from coding and data analysis to literature reviews, translation, an...

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  Conspicuous Cognition Podcast

  Are We Building Conscious AI Servants?

  May 21, 20261h 19mS0

  <p>Richard Dawkins recently announced in UnHerd that, after spending three days talking with an instance of Claude he christened “Claudia,” he had been moved to expostulate: “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” This produced a lot of mockery and criticism. But however one feels about Dawkins’s specific case, his reaction might become much more common as AI systems become increasingly intelligent. </p><p>In this episode, which Henry Shevlin and I recorded live on Substack (hence the slightly lower video quality), we discussed his first essay on his new Substack Polytropolis, “Behaviourism’s Revenge“, as...

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  Conspicuous Cognition Podcast

  Aliens, Superintelligence, and the Future of Science (with David Kipping)

  May 4, 20261h 22mS0

  <p>Most conversations about artificial intelligence are focused on Earth: jobs, misinformation, education, politics, science, regulation, consciousness, safety, and the future of human society. But AI—and especially the possibility of reaching “AGI” (artificial general intelligence) and “superintelligence”—forces us to think on much larger scales. If advanced AI is possible, why hasn’t it already emerged elsewhere? If civilisations can build self-replicating probes, artificial scientists, or planet-scale computational systems, why does the universe still look so natural? And if intelligent life is common, where is everyone?</p><p>In this episode, Henry and I discuss these and many other questions with...

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  Conspicuous Cognition Podcast

  Should We Care About AI Welfare? (with Robert Long)

  Apr 18, 20261h 29mS0

  <p>Almost all of the discussion about the risks associated with AI focuses on the dangers that increasingly advanced AI systems pose to us — to humanity. But what about the dangers that we might pose to them? As these systems become increasingly intelligent and agentic, AI companies, policy makers, and ordinary citizens need to start taking the possibility of AI consciousness and welfare seriously. If we are in the process of bringing complex and sophisticated minds into existence, how should we understand and treat such minds?</p><p>In this episode, Henry and I discuss these issues with Robert Long, fo...

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  Conspicuous Cognition Podcast

  Time To Start Panicking About AI?

  Mar 10, 20261h 8mS0

  <p>In this episode, Henry and I finally do something we probably should have done in the first episode: introduce ourselves. We talk about our backgrounds in philosophy, how we became interested in psychology and cognitive science, and what drew us to thinking about AI. From there, we dig into the current state of AI capabilities, especially “agentic” AI (e.g., Claude Code), the politics of AI (including the Trump administration's recent conflict with Anthropic), and whether the growing public hostility to AI is well-founded or misdirected. We wrap up with a big question: is it time to start panicking abou...

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