Thinking Through "Digital Minds" w/ Jacy Reese-Anthis

Mar 9, 2026·
Into AI Safety
Into AI Safety
· 3 min read
Jacy Reese-Anthis, founder of Sentience Institute and researcher at Stanford, began his journey working for animal welfare, but is now finishing up his PhD with research in many different AI subfields at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, social science, and machine learning. While this may seem like an odd jump at first, Jacy shares how his work has all been centered around the idea of moral circle expansion. In this episode, we dig into what sentience actually means (or at least how we can begin to think about it), why anthropomorphization is more complicated than it sounds, and how language models may be able to be leveraged as an effective tool for social science research.

Jacy also shares his median AGI estimate somewhere in there, so stay tuned if you want to catch it.

INTERVIEW RECORDED 2026.02.03; ASIDES RECORDED 2026.03.02; TRANSCRIPT

Chapters

00:00:00 ❙ Intro
00:05:41 ❙ From Animal Welfare to Digital Minds
00:09:00 ❙ Founding Sentience Institute
00:22:00 ❙ Defining Sentience
00:27:13 ❙ The Anthropomorphization Problem
00:47:51 ❙ Why "Digital Minds" (Not "Artificial Intelligence")
00:51:05 ❙ LLMs as Social Science Tools
01:07:03 ❙ Jacy’s AGI Timeline & The Singularity
01:09:23 ❙ Final Thoughts & Outro

Jacy’s Relevant Works

  • The Guardian article - It’s time to prepare for AI personhood
  • CHI paper - Digital Companionship: Overlapping Uses of AI Companions and AI Assistants
  • ICML paper - LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method
  • Sentience Institute blogpost - Key Questions for Digital Minds
  • ACL paper - The Impossibility of Fair LLMs
  • Preprint - HumanAgencyBench: Scalable Evaluation of Human Agency Support in AI Assistants

The ELIZA Effect

  • Wikipedia article - ELIZA effect
  • ACM paper - ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine
  • Elizabot demo
  • Smithsonian Magazine article - Why the Computer Scientist Behind the World’s First Chatbot Dedicated His Life to Publicizing the Threat Posed by AI
  • 99% Invisible podcast episode - The ELIZA Effect
  • Medium article - On AI Anthropomorphism

LaMDA

  • The Atlantic article - How a Google Employee Fell for the Eliza Effect
  • The Washington Post article - The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
  • AI Data Analytics Network blogpost - Full Transcript: Google Engineer Talks to “Sentient” Artificial Intelligence
  • Ars Technica article - Google fires Blake Lemoine, the engineer who claimed AI chatbot is a person

Jagged Frontier

  • Harvard Business School working paper - Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality
  • One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick) blogpost - Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier
  • One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick) blogpost - The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and the Uneven Frontier
  • Okanagan College Library guide - Artificial Intelligence in Research

Other Sources

  • Political Analysis paper - Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples
  • World Values Survey website
  • Wikipedia article - Integrated information theory
  • Alignment Forum article - Mesa-Optimization
  • Eleos AI website
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