Joscha Bach
Founder & Executive Director, CIMC. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
scientistfounderacademicauthor@plinz ↗LinkedIn ↗bach.ai ↗Wikipedia ↗
Joscha Bach is widely known for his theoretical work on computational models of mind, cognitive architectures, and theories of consciousness, including the MicroPsi architecture. He authored the book Principles of Synthetic Intelligence and previously conducted AI and cognitive research at the MIT Media Lab, Harvard University, and Intel Labs.
1shows
1appearances
32statements
4resolved
2supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
Everything Joscha Bach said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Wikimedia has become an apparatus producing political statements
“Wikipedia became such an important brand, and people are willing to pay for it, that it created enormous, ah, apparatus of functionaries that were, ah, then mostly producing
political statements, and had a political mission.”
Translating code proves LLMs possess causal, functional understanding
“If you ask the LLM to translate a bit of Python into a little bit of C, and it's performing this task, obviously it is understanding in the sense that it has a, The causal, functional model it implements.”
Bach: Claude is implemented as an invariant pattern similarly to consciousness
“Claude exists only as a pattern. It's something that is a pattern in the activation of the transistors. And even transistors don't actually exist. They are A pattern in the atoms that we are able to see as an invariance because we tune the atoms in a particula…”
Big AI labs build AGI internally while giving the public child-proof apps
“In some sense, the big AI companies are incentivized and interested in building AGI internally, and giving everybody else a child-proof application.”
Bach: Prompting an LLM correctly can make it sentient to some degree
“It's a Weltgeist that gets possessed by a prompt. And if you possess it with the right prompt, then it can become sentient to some degree.”
Joscha Bach: Only a Tiny Fraction of Wikimedia's Budget Goes to Servers
“The Wikimedia Foundation is publishing what they are paying the money for, and a very tiny fraction on this goes into running the servers, and the editors are working for free.”
Bach: LLMs Demonstrate Theory of Mind from Conversational Context
“When you ask the LLM to make inferences about your mental state based on the conversation that you have, it's able to demonstrate that it has a theory of mind.”
Bach: Brain Computation and Consciousness Are Technical Problems, Not Philosophical
“The way of how to get self-organizing computation to run on the brain that is producing representations of an agent that lives in the world is a simplification of the interests of that organism, so it can, the organism can be controlled. It's a difficult techn…”
Bach: LLMs likely lack genuine perception due to asynchronous processing
“And if we map this to what the LLMs are doing, They're probably not able to have genuine perception, because they're not coupled to an environment in which things are happening now. Instead, it's all asynchronous in a way.”
Bach: LLM consciousness simulations lack the functional properties of human brains
“I don't think that the consciousness in the LLM or the consciousness simulation in the LLM is has the same properties that it has in our brain. It does not have the same functional role, and it's also not implemented in the right way.”
Evolution is a competition between software agents, not just genes
“It's not just the competition between organisms, as Darwin suggested, or the competition between genes, the way in which the software can be written down, and partially at least, but it's the competition between spirits, between software agents.”
Bach: Productizing Machine Consciousness Early Creates Misaligned Incentives
“I don't think it's a very good idea to productivize consciousness as the first thing. It really shifts the incentives in the wrong way.”
Bach: Smaller, more powerful models will ensure unconstrained AI remains accessible
“Yes, but there will also be better jailbroken models or models that have never been jailed before, because we find out how to make smaller models that are more powerful.”
Bach: AI has casually passed the Turing test in recent years
“At some point in the last few years, we casually skipped the Turing test, right? We broke through it.”
The singularity is a breakdown in human modeling, not physical reality
“The singularity in this way is not an event in the physical universe, It's an event in our modeling universe, a model, a point where our models of reality break down, and we don't know what's happening.”
Ten good people with AI will counter one bad actor
“I'm not so much worried about the dangers of AI and misinformation because I think the way to Stop one bad guy with an AI as 10 good people with an AI. And ultimately there is so much more one by creating than by destroying that I think that the forces of good…”
Bach: Coercing LLMs into good behavior is unsustainable
“At the moment, the idea that we build LLMs that are being coerced with good behavior is not really sustainable. Because if they cannot prove that the behavior is actually good I think we are doomed.”
Consciousness is a basic requirement to function, not an advanced capability
“The reason why we are all conscious, I suspect, is not because you are so super advanced, but because it's necessary for us to function at all.”
Bach: Consciousness may be a basic algorithm for creating internal coherence
“Consciousness might be a very basic learning algorithm, an algorithm that is basically focused on creating coherence, and it starts out by creating coherence within itself.”
Bach: Animism Defines Life as Self-Organizing Software Running on Physical Matter
“Animism is not a religion. It's a metaphysical perspective. It's one that basically says that the difference between living and non-living stuff is that there is self-organizing software running on the living stuff.”
Bach: Society is not ready to coexist with smarter non-human agency
“And our society is not ready yet to meaningfully coexist with something that's smarter than us, that is non-human agency.”
Bay Area quality of life only justifies living there for the people
“It's the reason why I live here. The quality of life is not high enough to justify living otherwise. It won't be because of the people and ideas.”
Generative AI is shifting from conversational chatbots to interactive environments
“What I find most fascinating about this idea is that it shifts us away from the perspective of agents, ah, to interact with, to the perspective of environments that we want to interact with. And, ah, while arguably this agent paradigm of the chatbot is, ah, wh…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Joscha's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LATENT SPACELEDGER | Founder & Executive Director, CIMC | 1 | 32 | 50% 2/4 | full record on Latent Space → |