Are animals and computers conscious in the same way humans are?

Reid Hoffman is one of the world's best-known tech entrepreneurs and investors. Perhaps best known for his role in helping to co-found LinkedIn, he's also an accomplished writer and a student of philosophy. Reid was an early investor and advisor to OpenAI, the startup responsible for creating what is likely the best-known artificial intelligence tool in the world, ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a large language model that answers questions put to it in natural language. For example, what are the challenges in trying to understand the nature of consciousness? Reid explored the ins and outs of this emerging technology by actually co-authoring his most recent book, "Impromptu" with GPT-4.

In this excerpt from Dispatches from The Well, our host Kmele Foster sat down with Reid Hoffman to discuss how artificial intelligence could help us better understand human intelligence and what it means to be conscious. He debates the consciousness of animals and compares them to computers, explaining how "thinking" appears to look different from species to species, but that may not be the case. Do animals think like we do? What about AI? And, if the answer is yes, what does that mean for the future of technology and humanity as a whole?