Turing Award Winner: „I Created the Missing Link for Conscious AI” | Judea Pearl

Turing Award–winning pioneer Judea Pearl explains why causality is the missing link to conscious AI, why today’s LLMs are “clever” rather than understanding, and why—without new world-models—humans could become the “pets” of a more powerful digital species. We also unpack his take on free will (as an illusion we still need), consciousness (a blueprint of our own software), and what breakthroughs are closest: automated science and truly personalised medicine. 🔔 Subscribe for more science & tech conversations 🎧 Audio version: soon 📩 Share your takeaways in the comments ⏱️ Chapters 00:00 – Cold open: “We’ll be the pets” 00:42 – Who is Judea Pearl & why causality matters 01:12 – AI built on statistics vs real understanding 03:54 – From Bayes nets to cause→effect thinking 06:24 – Will machines be conscious? Individuality & experience 11:12 – Free will: the illusion we need to live by 17:36 – What is consciousness? A blueprint of our software 20:12 – Free will vs consciousness: key difference 21:00 – How to build causal machines: the 3-level causal ladder 23:06 – LLMs: “statistics on steroids” trained on causal humans 25:12 – What makes us human vs today’s AI 27:36 – How children learn; why robots still struggle 29:12 – Are Big Tech ignoring causality? 29:24 – AGI ahead of us; the “pets” scenario & existential risk 31:54 – Can we control it? Regulation, inevitability, realism 34:00 – Next 5 years: towards understanding free will 35:12 – Beyond the Turing test: clever vs intelligent 36:06 – Why AI feels like a black box 38:24 – Jobs & mass unemployment? 39:06 – The one change he’d make to LLM research 40:36 – Modeling the world without perfect physics 41:36 – Near-term wins: automated science & personalised medicine 43:00 – The Turing Award phone call 44:18 – Pearl’s most important paper: the counterfactual algorithm 45:24 – Closing thoughts