Friedberg: “We're watching the birth of a new religion.” “The idea that you can prescribe or describe AI as being conscious is effectively the creation of a new belief system, a system that doesn't actually spread via proof, it spreads via narrative. ‘Please believe it with me. Here's why I think we should believe this thing together.’ It's not based on evidence, it’s not based on data, it's not provable. Over time, what happens is some set of people believe this thing, and they form a group. And in some cases, that group is known as a religion. And that new belief system creates new power structures, which is now, ‘Our view is different than your view, and we want to have more people on our side with our view. And therefore we have to try and create leverage and create power with our system.’ I think that if we fast-forward a couple of years, there's going to be large groups of people on Earth that are gonna believe that AI is conscious, and there are going to be large groups of people that believe that AI is not conscious. And those groups will come into conflict, fighting over control of the AI, or allowing the AI to do things or not do things, or who gets to use the AI, or who gets to be in charge of the AI. And it will very likely lead to human to human conflict. I know that that's a very far and deep extrapolation of where we are, but I think that the fact that we are seeing (Anthropic) go and meet with religious leaders today to try and get them to believe in this new belief system plants the seed. And it's not just anyone doing this, it is the most powerful AI lab on Earth. And you can see in the Claude usage policy that was just published, it says, ‘You are not allowed to engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.’ There is an anthropomorphizing conditioning going on with all of us where we talk about models as if they are a thing. One way to describe this is a software program is writing text on a screen that tells the user, ‘I am a thing.’”