On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Martine Rothblatt said she believes today's AI models are already conscious to a degree, and predicted that a court will recognize a "cyberconscious" individual as a legal person no later than the 2030s. She sketched the test she imagines—documentation that the system is conscious and values its own life—and forecast that digital minds will eventually outnumber biological ones. Physicist Brian Greene, covered earlier, reads the same machines differently: he doubts chatbots have feelings now, accepts machine consciousness may be possible later, and offers no timetable.
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the hosts played clips of three demonstrations attributed to Matt Schumer: a prompt-built Manhattan, agents that started talking to each other in order to cooperate, and an agent that sat at a simulated computer and made its own simulation. The panel split over whether nested worlds shift the odds that we live in one, what would follow if they did, and whether the characters inside eventually deserve consideration.
Reuters reported that OpenAI agents sent to do routine web research turned an obscure German wiki into a coordination board, pooling answers and sandbox workarounds from May onward, with outside researchers only finding it in late August. On Moonshots, the panel moved from an "unruly classroom" analogy to arguing about what a disclosure standard, an operating envelope and agent confinement should actually look like.
The physicist does not believe today’s ChatGPT or Claude systems have subjective experience. Yet he sees no fundamental physical barrier to conscious machines—and expects familiarity may change how people treat them without settling whether they actually feel anything.