Ethics & Innovation: Does AI Actually Understand Our World?
About this episode
The episode explores the philosophical implications of AI understanding and its evaluation in relation to human cognition and geopolitical issues.
What does it really mean to say that an AI system understands, reasons or thinks? In this episode of Ethics and Innovation by Oxford+ brought to you by Equinox , host Susannah de Jager speaks with Dr Raphaël Millière, Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, about the deep conceptual questions behind today’s AI systems. Raphaël explains why strong performance on a benchmark does not always prove real competence, why language models learn in a profoundly different way from humans, and why common sense remains such a revealing fault line in AI research. The conversation moves from consciousness and anthropomorphism to the geopolitical stakes of sovereign AI. Recent research from Anthropic on global workspace-like structures in language models shows why questions about internal representations are becoming more urgent, while the European Commission’s 2026 technological sovereignty package underlines how AI capability is now tied to economic resilience, national security and democratic control. (00:00) - Welcome to Oxford+ (01:01) - Raphaël Millière’s Work in Philosophy of AI (03:24) - Performance, Competence and AI Evaluation (07:01) - Testing Analogy and…
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