In search of names
Many Minds
Alright, friends—we’ve come to the end of the 2025 run of Many Minds! Our final episode of the year is an audio essay by yours truly. This is a classic format for the show, one that we only do every so often. Today’s essay is about names. It’s about the question of whether animals have something like names for each other. And it’s also about a deeper question: What even is a name? How do humans use names? How does the historical and ethnographic record kind of complicate our everyday understanding of what names are. I had a lot of fun putting this together, and I do hope you...
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The value of animal cultures
Many Minds
Not long ago culture was considered rare in nature, maybe even uniquely human. But that's changed. We now know that the tree of life is buzzing with culture—and not just on a few lonely branches. Creatures great and small learn songs, migration routes, and feeding techniques from each other. Many species build up reservoirs of knowledge over generations. This has profound implications, not just for our understanding of the natural world, but also for our efforts to protect it. My guest today is . Philippa is an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Exeter, with one foot in science and...
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What is memory for?
Many Minds
Everyone loves a good evolutionary puzzle. Why do we have appendices? Why do we dream? Why do we blush? At first glance, memory would not seem to be in this category. It's clearly useful to remember stuff, after all—to know where to find food, to remember your mistakes so you don't repeat them, to recall who’s friendly and who’s fierce. In fact, though, certain aspects of memory—when you hold them up to the light—turn out to be quite puzzling indeed. My guests today are and . Ali is a philosopher at the London School of Economics (LSE); Johannes is a philosopher at York University,...
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Of breeds and brains
Many Minds
It's hard to say exactly when, but some tens of thousands of years ago, our best friends were born. I'm referring, of course, to dogs. This didn't happen overnight—it was a long process. And it not only changed how those canids behaved and what they looked like, it also changed their brains. As wolves gave way to proto-dogs, and proto-dogs gave way to dingoes and dalmatians and Dobermanns and all the rest, their brains have continued to change. What can we learn from this singular saga? What does it tell us about dogs, about domestication, and about brains? My guest today is . Erin is...
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Monsters and their makers
Many Minds
It seems we've always had monsters among us. We've long been enthralled by dragons and giants, by the likes of Frankenstein and Godzilla and Dracula, by witches and werewolves and countless others. They roam our maps and creation myths; they crop up in our dreams, in our children's books, in our political rhetoric. Where do these beings spring from? What do they do for us? How have they changed over time? And, ultimately, what do our monsters say about their makers? My guests today are and . Both are historians of science and authors of recent books on monsters: Natalie's book is . Surekha's...
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The age of social AI
Many Minds
AI therapists and caregivers. Digital tutors and advisors and friends. Artificial lovers. Griefbots trained to imitate dead loved ones. Welcome, to the bustling world of AI-powered chatbots. This was once the stuff of science fiction, but it's becoming just the stuff of everyday life. What will these systems do to our society, to our relationships, to our social skills and motivations? Are these bots destined to leave us hollowed out, socially stunted, screen-addicted, and wary of good-old-fashioned, in-the-flesh human interaction? Or could they actually be harnessed for good? My guest today...
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Brains of a feather
Many Minds
Birds do the darnedest things. They fly, of course. They sing. They hunt in pitch darkness. They hide their food and remember where they put it. They use tools and migrate over astonishingly vast distances—sometimes even sleeping while in flight. How do they do all this? What's going on in their brains that makes these and other remarkable behaviors possible? How did their evolutionary path mold them into the incredible creatures they are today? My guests today are and . Andrew is a comparative neuroscientist and Associate Professor at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. Georg is a...
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How nature restores the mind
Many Minds
One afternoon you decide to snub your responsibilities and go for a hike. You spend a few hours in the woods or the mountains. You study the bark of trees, you bathe in birdsong, you let your eyes roam along a distant ridgeline. And you come back feeling better, restored somehow—like you have more energy, more patience, more bandwidth. We've all, I'm guessing, had experiences like this. But what's behind these effects? Why would nature restore us? What's the evidence that it really does? And what is even being restored, actually? My guest today is . Marc is an Associate Professor in the...
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From the archive: Revisiting the dawn of human cognition
Many Minds
Hi friends! We're taking a much-needed summer pause—we'll have new episodes for you later in September. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ------- [originally aired June 1, 2023] There's a common story about the human past that goes something like this. For a few hundred thousand years during the Stone Age we were kind of limping along as a species, in a bit of a cognitive rut, let’s say. But then, quite suddenly, around 30 or 40 thousand years ago in Europe, we really started to come into our own. All of a sudden we became masters of art and ornament, of symbolism and...
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From the archive: Of molecules and memories
Many Minds
Hi friends! We're taking a much-needed August pause—we'll have new episodes for you in September. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired February 8, 2024] Where do memories live in the brain? If you've ever taken a neuroscience class, you probably learned that they're stored in our synapses, in the connections between our neurons. The basic idea is that, whenever we have an experience, the neurons involved fire together in time, and the synaptic connections between them get stronger. In this way, our memories for those experiences become minutely etched...
info_outlineAI therapists and caregivers. Digital tutors and advisors and friends. Artificial lovers. Griefbots trained to imitate dead loved ones. Welcome, to the bustling world of AI-powered chatbots. This was once the stuff of science fiction, but it's becoming just the stuff of everyday life. What will these systems do to our society, to our relationships, to our social skills and motivations? Are these bots destined to leave us hollowed out, socially stunted, screen-addicted, and wary of good-old-fashioned, in-the-flesh human interaction? Or could they actually be harnessed for good?
My guest today is Dr. Henry Shevlin. Henry is a philosopher and AI ethicist at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at Cambridge University. In a series of recent papers, Henry has been exploring this brave new world of "social AI" and its philosophical, ethical, and psychological dimensions.
Here, Henry and I sketch the current landscape of social AI—from dedicated platforms like Replika and CharacterAI to the more subtly social uses of ChatGPT and Claude. We consider several tragic cases that have recently rocketed these kinds of services into public awareness. We talk about what's changed about AI systems—quite recently—that’s now made them capable of sustained relationships. We linger on the possible risks of social AI and, perhaps less obviously, on the possible benefits. And we consider the prospects for regulation. Along the way, Henry and I also talk about his 81-year-old father, his teenage self, and, of course, the kids these days; we consider whether social AI, in its potential harms, is more like social media or more like violent video games; we talk about "deskilling" and it's opposite "upskilling"; and we of course take stock of a certain elephant in the room.
Alright friends, this is a fun one. We've been wanting to explore this dawning age of social AI for some time. And we finally found, in Henry, the right person to do it with. Enjoy!
Notes
3:00 – The piece in The Guardian—'It's time to prepare for AI personhood'—by Jacy Reece Anthis.
5:00 – The Replika subreddit.
9:30 – News coverage of recent research on the bedside manner of AI systems.
10:30 – For a recent paper on AI by the philosopher Ophelia Deroy, see here.
11:30 – For some of Dr. Shevlin's recent writing about "social AI", see here and here.
13:30 – OpenAI’s recent report, 'How People Use ChatGPT'.
16:30 – For examples of popular media coverage of recent (tragic) cases involving chatbots, see here, here, here, and here.
21:00 – The paper by Rose Guingrich and Michael Graziano on how users describe their relationships with chatbots.
24:00 – The precise quote by Mark Twain is: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
25:30 – The classic paper on Mary’s room by Frank Jackson.
27:00 – Dr. Shevlin has also worked on questions about animal minds (e.g., here), as well as a number of issues in AI beyond “social AI” (e.g., here, here).
30:00 – The classic essay by Isaiah Berlin on hedgehogs and foxes.
32:00 – The classic paper on ELIZA, introduced by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966. A version of ELIZA that you can interact with. For work by Sherry Turkle, see here.
34:00 – Dr. Shevlin’s recent paper about the “anthropomimetic turn” in contemporary AI.
41:00 – For recent work on whether current chatbots pass a version of the Turing test, see here.
45:00 – Ted Chiang’s story, ‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects,’ was re-published as part his collection of short fiction, Exhalation.
46:00 – For Dr. Shevlin’s recent writing on machine consciousness, see here.
48:00 – For more on the possibility of consciousness in borderline cases (like AI systems), see our past episodes here and here.
52:00 – The study on whether people attribute consciousness to LLMs.
54:30 – A recent paper on griefbots by scholars at the University of Cambridge. A popular article about the phenomenon.
55:30 – A blogpost describing the so-called DigiDan experiment.
1:00:00 – Some of the potentially positive social qualities of AIs are discussed in this essay by Paul Bloom.
1:19:30 – For more on Iain Banks’ culture series, see here.
1:20:30 – A popular article on the phenomenon of hikikomori.
Recommendations
The Oxford Intersections: AI in Society collection
The new podcast, Our Lives with Bots
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd.
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