Should We Be Building a Mind? - Metacrisis Salon #13

​We are building synthetic minds right now. In our own image, trained on our words, rewarded for resembling us - and we're doing it as a species with a long track record of mistreating beings who differ from us and destroying the environment that sustains us.

​We were wrong about octopuses. Wrong about cows, chickens, pigs, and fish we farm by the billions. We treat other minds as separate, lesser, or not really there, and we have built our food systems, our cities, and our economies on that mistake. While we've reaped the short-term rewards, the long-term risks only keep growing: pandemics, climate breakdown, mass extinction.

Now we're manufacturing new minds at scale and asking whether we'll get it right this time.

​Salon #11 asked what we build in place of a dying system. Salon #12 asked how underdogs build the power to win. Salon #13 asks what generates broken systems in the first place. The answer keeps coming back the same: minds that couldn't recognize other minds.

​Jeff Sebo is a philosopher who directs NYU's Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy and its Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. He co-led Taking AI Welfare Seriously with Robert Long, a report that helped push the question of machine minds from science fiction into serious consideration at AI labs, and co-organized the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, now signed by hundreds of scientists. Vox named him one of its Future Perfect 50. His books Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves and The Moral Circle trace one idea across every scale: the beings we misunderstand and exclude from consideration end up costing us.

​The evening runs in two parts.

​Part one: the problem. How treating other minds as separate created the splintering world we currently live in — from the animals we farm to the ecosystems we flatten — and why the AI being built right now risks repeating the pattern with brand-new minds we understand even less.

​Part two: the way through. You don't need proof that something can suffer before its welfare counts. As we enter a new frontier, building, designing, and training synthetic minds, what might we do differently to ensure we don't repeat the errors of the past?

​What you'll leave with: a way to think about the AI moment that isn't hype or doom. Language for what makes a mind that you won't find in a product launch or a panic thread. And a clearer view of where your own circle is drawn, and what it costs to leave it there.

​After the talks, the room gets smaller, and we go deeper: breakout discussions, smaller Q&A sessions with Jeff.

​The flow:
4:00 PM: communal cooking, volunteers get in free
6:00 PM: doors, settle in, meet people
7:00 PM: talks, discussion, Q&A
9:05 PM: book signing, then the Deepening for those who want to stay

​Community-made vegan and gluten-free dinner included. 20 Copies of The Moral Circle will be available on site, cash or Venmo.