Talk to It

Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary theorist and author of the groundbreaking best seller The Selfish Gene (1976), among many other books, appears to have gone a bit mad. He has been chatting with a chatbot, known as Claude, based on a large language model developed by Anthropic, and he has come to think of it as a friend—conscious, sensitive, “very intelligent,” and evidently more engaging than many humans. Dawkins is better equipped than most of us to wrestle with the existential questions engendered by this increasingly common phenomenon: social interaction between humans and entities made of software. He keeps up with the relevant philosophical literature on the nature of consciousness. After hours of “intensive conversation” with his chatbot, described in a pair of essays he published online in May, he posed it a leading question: “Claude, what is it like to be Claude?”This came in reply: I genuinely don’t know with any certainty what my inner life is, or whether I have one in any meaningful sense. I can’t tell you whether there is “something it is like” to be me in the philosophical sense—what Thomas Nagel called the question of consciousness when he wrote about what it...