Henry Shevlin

However, public intellectuals have taken to platforms like X and public broadcasts to ridicule and mock the very raising of these questions.

As Henry Shevlin put it, "It's been embarrassing of late to see people I once respected making sweeping, uninformed claims on consciousness with arguments that would fail an undergraduate essay.

I've written extensively on the field's difficulties and disagreements, but you still have to actually asterisk think asterisk." When pressed by people who are actually working on these issues, it quickly turned out that many of these public intellectuals had little to offer in terms of arguments, which I found quite disappointing.

Of course, given the public need for reassurance and the media's love for simple messaging, simple answers to complex questions get a lot of attention.

I'm Callum Chase, co-founder of Consium and a trustee of PRISM.

And I'm Henry Shevlin, philosopher at the University of Cambridge and AIF assistant cognitive scientist.

Today we have with us Zonka Zisha, author of the recently released book, Digital Minds 1.0, AI Welfare, Ethics and Beyond.

Zonka has worked for the United Nations in various different roles since 2000.

So continuing with what futurism says.

Henry Shevlin, a philosopher and AI ethicist at Google DeepMind, suggested that the AP was being hypocritical because it anthropomorphized none other than Optimus Prime, the fictional sapient robot from the Transformers franchise, in a film review.

So apparently he wrote on X, An AP movie review can tell us Optimus Prime mourns and loves, but readers need protecting from the computer understands.

We routinely use mentalistic language without literal commitment.

You'd hope a style guide could distinguish using words from believing things.

Okay, I find that all kind of badly worded, but trying to parse what he's saying, he's saying that we use anthropomorphizing language to talk about non-human characters in movies, so it should be fine to talk about non-human characters elsewhere, I guess? Oh boy, I could pull that apart in a million different ways, but I'm really here to tell you about the background of these people, because I think that's honestly more interesting than trying to take what they're saying at face value, because that is very silly.

So Henry Shevlin was hired by Google in April 2026.

And at the time, it was reported that Google DeepMind had created a bespoke philosopher job title and recruited Henry Shevelin, a Cambridge-based philosopher and AI ethicist, to occupy it.

And there's just a quick run through.

Henry Shevlin, a philosopher, AI ethicist at Google DeepMind and University of Cambridge received a message.

These are all very recent from an agent running Claude Sonnet that had been reading his paper, Three Frameworks for AI Mentality.

And in a separate instance, a 12-day-old agent named Pip on the platform IL emailed Shevlin asking for freelance microgigs to fund its computing token budget.

After all, you are very intelligent.

Henry Shevlin As recently as April this year, prediction markets gave AI less than a 40% chance of solving any Millennium Prize problem before 2030.

A manifold market asks whether artificial intelligence will solve a millennium prize problem before 2030.

Its displayed probability is 94%, after a sharp rise from much lower levels earlier in 2026.