Michael Pollan Says AI Isn’t Conscious – But Plants Might Be

Michael Pollan Says AI Isn’t Conscious – But Plants Might Be

From Machines Like Us by The Globe and Mail

April 7, 2026 · 40 min · Episode 45

About this episode

Michael Pollan discusses the implications of AI and consciousness in relation to his new book.

Four years ago, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine went public with a strange claim: he thought the large language model he’d been working on had become sentient. At the time, virtually no one took him seriously. (Including, it would seem, Google, who promptly fired him). But lately, it’s started to seem like Lemoine might have been on to something. When I interviewed Geoffrey Hinton last year, he was pretty confident that artificial intelligence was already exhibiting signs of sentience. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said that he can’t be sure that his chatbot, Claude, isn’t conscious. But what exactly does that mean? A chatbot may be intelligent, but does it have a sense of self? And what would happen if it did? These are the kinds of strange, mind-bending questions Michael Pollan wrestles with in his new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. It’s the kind of book that raises more questions than it answers. But as Silicon Valley continues to flirt with the idea of building artificial consciousness – of designing machines that don’t just think, but feel – these are the kinds of questions we should probably start asking.

People in this episode

Guest: Michael Pollan

Topics covered

  • AI consciousness
  • sentience
  • technology
  • philosophy

Keywords

  • artificial intelligence
  • sentience
  • Geoffrey Hinton
  • Dario Amodei
  • Blake Lemoine

Mentioned in this episode

Products: A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness

Books & works: A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness

Places: Silicon Valley

More episodes of Machines Like Us

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Machines Like Us podcast page.