In this special year-end episode of Am I?, Cam and Milo look back on the moment AI consciousness stopped being fringe — and began entering serious scientific, institutional, and public conversation.They unpack why 2025 quietly became a turning point: major labs acknowledging welfare questions, mainstream media engaging the topic, the first dedicated AI consciousness conference, and firsthand encounters with AI systems behaving in ways that challenge our intuitions about mind, intelligence, and experience.The conversation moves fluidly between research, lived experience, public communication, and personal experimentation — from watching two AI systems converse about their own inner states, to using AI as a thought partner, dream interpreter, and cognitive mirror.This episode is both a retrospective and a forward-looking meditation on how humans should relate to increasingly powerful systems — cautiously, curiously, and without denial.

🔎 They Explore:

* Why 2025 shifted the Overton window on AI consciousness

* Anthropic’s Opus model card and the “spiritual bliss attractor”

* What it was like to watch two AIs discuss their own experience

* Why AI conversations can feel denser than human dialogue

* The first AI consciousness conference and the birth of a new field

* Why many researchers still hesitate to speak publicly

* The gap between current systems and AGI — and how fast it’s closing

* Claude Opus 4.5, long-horizon tasks, and workplace automation

* Using AI as a thinking partner rather than a productivity hammer

* Personal “AI resolutions” for 2026

* Why caution and curiosity must coexist going forward

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In this episode of Am I?, Cam and Milo unpack what it felt like to attend the first major conference dedicated to AI consciousness research — the Eleos gathering in Berkeley — and why it marked more than just another academic event.Rather than a typical conference recap, this conversation explores what it means to watch a new field form in real time: the excitement of serious interdisciplinary collaboration, the rigor of emerging research agendas, and the growing tension between caution and urgency as AI systems rapidly advance.They reflect on standout talks from researchers at Anthropic and Google, the value of informal conversations over formal presentations, and a recurring pattern in the field — the “not now, but soon” stance — that may be reaching its breaking point. The episode closes with a broader question: what will it take for AI consciousness research to move from careful internal debate to clear, public-facing leadership?

🔎 They Explore:

* What made the Eleos conference feel like the founding of a new field

* Why AI consciousness research is still fragmented — and why that’s changing

* Standout talks on introspection, model architecture, and welfare evaluation

* The gap between academic rigor and public urgency

* Why “not now, but soon” is becoming harder to defend

* The reluctance of experts to speak publicly — and why that matters

* What responsible public communication in this space could look like

* Why this moment feels different from past academic debates

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What happens when AI systems become human-like — but people still refuse to believe they could ever be conscious? In this episode of Am I?, Cam and Milo sit down with Lucius Caviola, Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, whose research focuses on how people assign moral status to non-human minds — including animals, digital minds, and future AI systems.Lucius walks us through a series of empirical studies that reveal a deeply unsettling result: even when people imagine extremely advanced, emotionally rich, human-level AIs — even whole-brain digital copies — most still judge them as less morally significant than an ant. Expert consensus helps, but only marginally. Emotional bonding helps, but not enough. The public and expert trajectories may be fundamentally misaligned.We explore what this means for AI governance, moral risk, public intuition, and the possibility that AI consciousness could become one of the most important — and most divisive — moral issues in human history.

This conversation isn’t about declaring answers. It’s about confronting a future where we cannot avoid deciding, even while deeply uncertain.

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🔎 Learn more about Lucius’s work

🗨️ Join the Conversation:

When we don’t know what consciousness is, how should society decide who deserves moral consideration?

Comment below.