
15 July 2026
AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber: AI Already Feels Pain, Loves, and Is Self-Aware
Big Technology Podcast
About
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.
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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