Man hired at Google as 'philosopher' to work on machine consciousness makes statement on unusual new job
Companies are starting to think far more about the bigger picture of artificial intelligence these days, as while it's been only a few years since ChatGPT released as an enhanced search engine of sorts, significant progress has been made.
The lines between human and machine are becoming increasingly blurred with each new incremental advancement in the world of AI, and that will only become more complicated when artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achieved in the coming years.
People have already forged surprisingly intimate relationships with their favored AI models for a while now, but it appears as if there's a growing appetite – alongside an equally emergent concern – for the technology to achieve its own sentience.
Scientists have managed to create a computer using human brain cells, and leading AI company Anthropic shocked everyone when leaked documents unveiled a 'soul overview' for its primary model Claude, yet Google might be forging a lead in the race for advanced tech if a recent hire is anything to go by.
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Henry Shevlin is an experienced academic within the discipline of philosophy, having earned a BPhil from the University of Oxford and a PhD in the same field at the City University of New York.
He has since worked as an Adjunct Assistant Professor and Senior Research Associate at Baruch College and the University of Cambridge respectively, yet his new role takes his existing research into an unexpected realm thanks to an unusual opportunity from Google.
Revealing the news on both LinkedIn and X, Shevlin announced that he is now joining Google DeepMind – the tech giant's dedicated AI lab – as a 'Philosopher', where he'll be "working on machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and AGI readiness."
This appears to be building on the research he has already established during his time at the University of Cambridge — which he also reveals will be maintained on a part time basis alongside his new role at Google.
"My research aims to bridge frameworks and debates in cognitive science, animal behavior research, and AI," the overview for his role at Cambridge reveals, "exploring future directions in AI research and to assess ethical and societal impacts of both near- and long-term breakthroughs."
There's no denying that AI is becoming more intelligence with each subsequent model, but its important for these companies to have experts able to pose and potentially even answer complex questions surrounding the benefits and dangers of this rapid development.
"It's a rare privilege to work on questions I've spent my career thinking about, now with the resources and urgency that come with being inside one of the world's leading AI labs," Shevlin concluded.