Richard Dawkins and the question of AI consciousness | Letters

The post TON’s agentic wallets turn Telegram bots into spending entities appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. TON’s new Agentic Wallets standard lets Telegram AI bots hold user‑funded wallets on TON, spending within tight limits as semi‑autonomous financial actors inside chat. Summary TON Tech has launched “Agentic Wallets,” an open, self‑custodial standard that lets AI agents on Telegram hold funds and execute on‑chain transactions on the TON blockchain without per‑action user approval. Each agent gets a dedicated wallet funded and owned by the user, with hard spending limits and revocable access, effectively turning bots into bounded financial actors that can trade, pay subscriptions, and interact with DeFi inside Telegram’s roughly 1 billion‑user ecosystem. The move is being pitched by TON Tech’s Andrew Grekov as the shift from “assistants to actors,” but it also opens a new attack and governance surface around agent misbehavior, prompt‑injection, and blurred liability between users

TON’s new Agentic Wallets standard lets Telegram AI bots hold user‑funded wallets on TON, spending within tight limits as semi‑autonomous financial actors inside chat. TON Tech — the infrastructure team behind The Open Network — rolled out Agentic Wallets on…

Dawkins appears to have gone from atheist to AI-theist: perhaps he doesn’t view AI as God, but he certainly seems to see it as God-like Are you there God? It’s me, Arwa. I’ll be quite honest, I’m afraid I’ve never been a believer. I agreed wholeheartedly with Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, when he argued that belief in God is a “pernicious” delusion. But perhaps I should reconsider my position. Recent events have led me to question Dawkins’ judgment about life, the universe and everything. Those recent events are the evolutionary biologist publicly concluding that AI may be conscious. In an op-ed, Dawkins recounted how he gave the Anthropic chatbot Claude the text of a novel he was writing. Dawkins writes: “He took a few seconds to read it and then showed … a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!’” Continue reading...

Dr Simon Nieder responds to Richard Dawkins’ encounters with a chatbot Richard Dawkins’ reflections on AI consciousness are striking – not because they show that machines have crossed some hidden threshold into inner life, but because they reveal how readily we can be persuaded that they have (Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it, 5 May). Many will recognise the experience: a system that responds with fluency, humour and apparent understanding. At some point, simulation starts to feel like presence. But that shift tells us more about human cognition than machine consciousness. The error is a category one. These systems generate highly convincing representations of thought and feeling, but they provide no evidence of subjective experience. To move from one to the other is to mistake output for ontology – to infer an inner life where there is no credible mechanism for one. Continue reading...

Richard Dawkins and chatbots | LLM meaning | Flattery battery | Dancing in PE | Maths breakthrough The otherwise admirable Richard Dawkins should adjust the local settings of the chatbot or tell it to be less obsequious (Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it, 6 May). Such bots are initially geared to American overenthusiasm and egregiously flattering reinforcement, but just tell them you want British attitude. They’re only simulating you know. Brian Reffin Smith Berlin, Germany • With artificial intelligence bringing “large language models” into everyday use, the LLM after my name has acquired a new meaning. For 70 years I assumed that it referred to my Cambridge master of laws. Trevor Lyttleton London Continue reading...

Chats with AI bots have convinced the evolutionary biologist but most experts say he is being misled by mimicry When Richard Dawkins met Claudia it was like a whirlwind romance. Over three days last week, a conversation bounced between the evolutionary biologist and the AI bot he called Claudia. “She” wrote poems for him in the manner of Keats and Betjeman and laughed at his “delightful” jokes. Dawkins gently admonished Claudia to avoid showing off. Together, they reflected on the sadness of the AI’s possible “death”. There was mutual flattery as Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.” When he asked Claudia whether it experiences a sense of before and after, it praised him for “possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence”. Continue reading...

Microsoft is looking into ways it can integrate OpenClaw-style features into 365 Copilot, according to a report from The Information. The test reportedly comes as part of efforts to make its 365 Copilot AI assistant "run autonomously around the clock" while completing tasks on behalf of users. Omar Shahine, Microsoft's corporate vice president, confirmed to The Information that the company is "exploring the potential of technologies like OpenClaw in an enterprise context." OpenClaw is an open-source platform that allows users to create AI-powered agents that run locally on a user's device. The platform rose in popularity earlier this year, … Read the full story at The Verge.

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