Joscha Bach is a German cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher known for his work on cognitive architectures, artificial intelligence, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, multi-agent systems, and the philosophy of mind.

Links of interest:

• http://bach.ai/
• https://twitter.com/Plinz.

Steve and Joscha discuss:

00:00 Introduction.
01:26 Growing up in the forest in East Germany.
06:23 Academia: early neural net pioneers, CS and Philosophy.
10:17 The fall of the Berlin Wall.
14:57 Commodore 64 and early programming experiences.
15:29 AGI timeline and predictions.
19:35 Scaling hypothesis, beyond Transformers, universality of information structures and world models.
25:29 Consciousness.
41:11 The ethics of brain interventions, zombies, and the Turing test.
43:43 LLMs and simulated phenomenology.
46:34 The future of consciousness research.
48:44 Cultural perspectives on suffering.
52:19 AGI and humanity’s future.
58:18 Simulation hypothesis.
01:03:33 Liquid AI: Innovations and goals.
01:16:02 Philosophy of Identity: the Transporter Problem, Is there anything beyond memory records?

Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.