AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber: AI Already Feels Pain, Loves, and Is Self-Aware

Big Technology Podcast

Jürgen Schmidhuber is an AI pioneer and professor whom The Guardian has called "the father of AI." Schmidhuber joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether current AI techniques can actually reach AGI. Tune in to hear him spar with Greg Brockman's case for scaling GPT models alone, argue that AI has been capable of pain and consciousness since the early 1990s, and predict the collapse of today's trillion-dollar AI spending. We also cover the hardware bottleneck holding back robots, free will in a computable universe, and uploading human minds into machines. Hit play for a wide-ranging conversation with one of the researchers whose ideas built the foundation of modern AI.

---

Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.

Watch the full documentary here: https://www.gravitee.io/ai-agent-documentary

Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b



Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More description

Jürgen Schmidhuber is an AI pioneer and professor whom The Guardian has called "the father of AI." Schmidhuber joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether current AI techniques can actually reach AGI. Tune in to hear him spar with Greg Brockman's case for scaling GPT models alone, argue that AI has been capable of pain and consciousness since the early 1990s, and predict the collapse of today's trillion-dollar AI spending. We also cover the hardware bottleneck holding back robots, free will in a computable universe, and uploading human minds into machines. Hit play for a wide-ranging conversation with one of the researchers whose ideas built the foundation of modern AI.

---

Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.

Watch the full documentary here: https://www.gravitee.io/ai-agent-documentary

Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b



Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2026-07-15 62 min
Listen elsewhere

Available Results

Generated results are saved to your library for reuse and search.

No generated results are available for this episode yet.

Transcript

No transcript is available for this episode yet.
Sign in to generate a transcript for review.
Sign in

Chapters

No chapters available.