---
title: AI Ethics Through The Lens of Animism
pretalx_url: https://pretalx.seagl.org/2024/talk/V3PRLD/
beginning: '2024-11-09T11:00:00-08:00'
end: '2024-11-09T11:50:00-08:00'
presenters:
- name: Elior Sterling
  pretalx_url: https://pretalx.seagl.org/2024/speaker/AYUUDL/
  biography: Elior used to do computer stuff. Now he does rabbi stuff. He also studied
    Anthropology, Linguistics, and History at UC Berkeley, which was kinda fun.
---

Animism (or panpsychism) understands the Universe to be inherently sentient and conscious. If even a rock has an internal experience, then it follows that a computer system also has some form of internal experience. Counter to the academic views of previous generations of Western academics, the animist worldview does not anthropomorphize animals, plants, mountains, or celestial bodies, but rather sees them as their own types of entities with very different experiences and very different ways of being. In this talk, I will discuss the advantages of taking an animist or panpsychist approach to AI systems and then consider some of the ethical problems along with proposed resolutions to those challenges.
